Dying for It

My mother started coloring my hair when I was 11 or 12.  She didn't like her own dark brown color and lightened it with light brown Nice 'n Easy.  If there was some dye left in the bottle, she used it on me.  Consequently, I didn't see my natural color again for a couple of decades as I got bitten by the hair coloring bug. 

Over the years, my hair has been everywhere from medium blonde to near-black. I had both solid-colored hair and highlights, both self- and professionally-applied. By the end of 2005, my hair was on the dark blonde end of the scale after some extra highlighting was done for my 40th birthday visit to Las Vegas.  After seeing shots of myself taken in March of 2006, I realized my hair was far too light.  I needed to get back to my natural shade of dark brown and avoid the whole monthly root touch-up ordeal. 

I bought a box of my mother's old faithful Nice 'n Easy in a dark brown.  It went on easy enough but looked overly-dark for a few weeks.  Once the color had faded enough to my liking, it had also become reddish.  I have a bit of natural golden cast to my hair, but as my roots grew out, I could see that it was nowhere near as brassy as the dye had left it.  So I tried again, with another Clairol product, this time in a dark ash brown.  I got the same results.  Over the next several months I tried two or three other products, all of which left my hair auburn, before finally picking up a box of L'Oreal Natural Match.  I had tried L'Oreal Feria a couple of years back and it did weird textural things to my hair that scared me, so I avoided L'Oreal hair products to this point.  Plus, they were more expensive. But my only other option to getting back to my natural color was a professional dye job, and that would really be more than I wanted to spend.  So Natural Match went into the shopping cart.

I always find that opening bottles and mixing dye while wearing gloves is awkward, and it seemed to be a little more so with Natural Match.  Once mixed, the dye went on easily and didn't make as much of a mess as other products. (I usually end up with dye all over the white tile of the bathroom; it doesn't show up until it dries.) And the shower didn't look like a crime scene after I washed it out either.

After drying my hair, the color was dark, but not too dark. It faded slightly after a week or so, but, miraculously, did not turn red!  My hair was finally back to its natural shade!

I colored my hair before Christmas--it's now April and my roots are not showing.  A shame I'll never have to buy this product again (well, not until I start showing significant gray) but I highly recommend it to people who want a color product that is true to the shade on the box, and that doesn't fade or discolor significantly over time.