This is my gray hair transition journey. You too can learn how to transition from dyed red hair to natural gray with a clear, step-by-step process. Tips for blending, maintenance, and embracing your gray journey.
This is my 10th salon visit on gray transition journey. It is also my last trip to the hair dresser for a salon treatment or haircut for a few months. We are traveling for 3+ months, so it is a while until my next appointment with my stylist. I will probably get a few blowouts on the ship, but a haircut? Nope. And highlights or lowlights? Absolutely not.
Transitioning Dyed Red Hair to Gray: All My Steps 15 Month Mark
I walked into this appointment looking – to me – very blonde. Yes, I have many inches of gray roots, gray/white framing my face, and when I curl my hair I see not only large white streaks, but inches of silver hair.
Still, I expected it to look more cohesive than it currently does.
It also does not look like it has grown much. I got a good chop my last appointment two months ago, and I can tell the ends are longer, so why don’t the roots appear to have grown?
I wonder if I have gone hair-color-blind? I think it is time to start taking between-service photos again so I can better gage the growth of the gray.
While I do not go in to the salon very frequently (my salon schedule is currently based on our travel schedule), and I knew that brassiness could result with infrequent visits, I have been fairly faithful in using purple shampoo every fourth wash (so every other week). I want my whole head to be gray/silver/white, and when I leave the hair salon is is… ish. But, when I return two months later I truly need to return and color correct.
Once again I am at the point where I am considering chopping my hair off and just going gray naturally. My hair is about 8 or so inches of natural growth out, so how bad would it look!?
Heh. If I did that, I’d be looking at extensions and that is 6-8 week maintenance, so I am basically picking my poison between extensions and hair color.
When I actually walked into the salon my hairdresser was so excited to see how much my hair had grown, and how gray it looked!!
Apparently, I am getting hair-color-blind to my natural gray.
She was training a new assistant, so this appointment was three hours long even though there were no highlights or low-lights this session. Explanations and training take a while.
When I sat in the chair she mentioned my hair was pretty yellow to her (even I could see the yellow in some places). She was leaning toner only, and I immediately told her I would not be back for three months. I was not sure that information would help or change her plans.
She did say that the ends had an orangey tinge, and asked if I minded cutting them off.
I told her to go ahead, and now my hair is just past shoulders.
She applied k18, cut off a few inches of my hair when it was dry, brought me over to the sink, washed my hair, and applied a fast acting toner. She and her assistant watched as it pulled out the yellow and other colors. There is a lifting agent in that fast acting toner.
After that, the fast acting toner was washed out, and an icy blonde toner was brushed onto my hair.
My hair was washed, K18-ed, conditioned, and a towel placed on it. When my stylist took off the towel at the mirror, the silver was evident even with wet hair!
After a good finishing cut, she blow-dried my hair, curled it annnnnnd… now I am sorta gray!
Oh sure, there is a lot more that needs to grow out, the ends still have color, and eventually that will all be cut off, but if someone were to see my right now? I am not sure I would be considered blonde or even light brown. Whether that remains in another 6-8 weeks, we shall see.
A few notes: we were discussing my accidental fall the prior year (11 months prior to this appointment). She thought my hair had finally recovered from the trauma as both toners “did exactly what they are supposed to do.” That fast acting toner had some lift in it, and lift it did. She felt my hair was thicker, had grown faster, and generally was back to looking great.
I know I have doubts and whine a bit about how long this is taking. It is now about 16 months since my last red root touch-up, and about a year since my last full highlight/lowlight processing to get the majority of the red out (I have had spot-partials since) buuuuttttt… I want it done NOW! However, it is moving along. And, it will be at least three years before it is grown out fully to a longer length that I like although I doubt I will ever grow it as long as it was when I started this process (the top image)!
As it is now about a year since the real grow out began (after removing most of the red), and in that time I had a pretty severe accident that seemed to have slowed my hair growth, I guess the amount of growth is ok. “A year to the ears” seems true.
I asked her if she thought the color had changed. She hesitated… I had considered I was more silver than the white when the process started, but she disagreed with that, so maybe I am just loony. (Hush, Hubby.)
My next appointment is not for 15 weeks! Hubby and I are on another vacation, this one a long trip starting in New Zealand and ending in Japan. During that time, we will mostly be on a ship. I do have undo goo, L’Oréal metal detox, purple shampoo, and Kérastase shampoo and conditioner. I am bringing K18, leave-in conditioner, and heat protectant. I am bringing a round brush and curling iron for styling (an air-wrap does not do well on a ship due to the fluctuating power supply).
I expect to have a few styling appointments on the ship to see how the wash and blow dry are there. As I mentioned before, almost all ships use the same company for their spa, so it is just a matter of the luck of the stylist draw.
This is my 11th salon visit on my gray transition journey.
Wow. I was away for months. It has been 3½ (15 weeks) months since my last service and my hair looks like crap. People aren’t kidding when they say hair reverts to warm. My hair is VERY yellow where the highlights and toner were, and it is jarring against the cool silver/white of the new growth, not to mention my cool toned skin.
And, it happened suddenly. At 12 weeks my hair still looked pretty uniform. By week 14 it was waaaay past pretty.
We were away for 14 weeks. During that time I did my own washing and styling (only visited the ship’s hair salon once). I was very faithful to using K-18, purple shampoo, metal detox, and my regular shampoo until the last two weeks when I ran out of the K-18 and metal detox. The last two weeks were my Kérastase and Kérastase purple shampoo (purple shampoo only once).
The roots are very long. In the front, my face framing is all white and down past my chin. That looks nice, but not as white as it did before as it is against gray now, not the calico mixture (so less contrast). Behind it, are roots between 5-10″ long silver hair. In the back, my hair is a mix of brown, yellow, silver, white, and gray. But, towards the bottom, it is a white, brown, and silver mix.
I definitely look gray, but I do have a lot of yellow in my hair from where the toner washed away.
I am strongly considering cutting it all off and just going with a chin length haircut and no more processing or toning.
(Note: this post is stylist visit 11. In real life, I am just past visit 19. My biggest regret on this journey is not cutting it off at this point in the process – visit 11. If you ever reach the point of “do I cut it off to chin length?” Consider it. For me I was a short cut a way from being finished with the process, and I regret not doing it. I should have just gone for the gusto!)
I cannot wait to hear my stylist’s ideas as I do not really want to be that short, but if I do cut it, it is just growing it after that, and a toner a few times a year to keep the yellow away.
I have noticed that the farther along I get in this process, the more willing I am to cut my non-gray hair off. When I began this grow out my hair was long, beautiful, and red. It is now… not any of those things.
Six months into this process the red was mostly gone, and my hair was a long, beautiful calico cat coloring with a lot of silver/white at the top.
Then… I had a fall, and everything seemed to have stopped. My hair went into a shock – as hair sometimes does after a dramatic physical injury. And, I had my first length chop.
My hair stopped growing for a few months, the ends looked kind of scraggly, then my hair slowed its growth and with the haircuts it seemed that going shorter was going to happen whether I liked it or not.
But still, I persisted. While I am usually a go-with-the-flow kind of gal, I can be very stubborn on occasion (ask Hubby or Sonny-boy about that). I decided I was going gray, and dabnabit, gray I was going to be!
My hairdresser was amazed at how much my hair grew since she saw me last. Yes, it was yellow on top but she felt sure toner would take care of that. She and I agreed that if we could cut off the top layer of my hair, I’d be done. The underneath is silver and white.
She decided no more dark additions. I have a darker area in the upper back of my head but the rest of my hair is silver or white. There is some dimension to it, however.
She started by chopping 4-5” off the bottom of my hair. We discussed a chin bob, but that was too short for me to pull back. (Hindsight? I should have done it.) That would have been the end of processing, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t do it. At the writing of this post I am closing in on 18 months of my gray hair journey, and had a major growth setback a year prior do to a fall. As I have said, It was a bad fall and a total shock to my system and my hair stopped growing for a few months.
She then took a lot, but not all, of the dark hair and highlighted it. She used 10 vol to get me to the ‘mushy banana’ color, and then toned it with an icy silver.
Once the icy silver toner was applied, my hair looked silver. If someone looks at me now, I look like a silver haired person that started as a blonde. There is some blonde popping through, some dark still at the ends, but most of my hair is silver and white.
My hairdresser said I am one ‘good’ haircut from being done with highlights. And, from the photos, I can see what she means. I will probably do it in a few months just before we head overseas again, or when we come back.
This is the shortest my hair has been in about 10 years (this will become a refrain). Yes, I can pull it back, but this length is honestly more work than when my hair was long at the start of this journey. That is because putting it up in a scrunchy at night where I weave the hair to get morning curls is not possible at this length, and what I used to do to make it look good in between washes was much easier when long. I now need to fuss with it a bit more in the morning to get it to look decent.
I will say drying it this short is an absolute breeze! It takes me about 15 minutes to get it dried and styled at this short length.
My hair is also starting to outgrow that wiry and coarse gray hair stage. I have a lot of new growth (gray baby hairs are no fun, but better than the alternative of no new hairs growing), but it is coming in smooth and fine, just like my processed hair used to be – < crosses fingers > that this continues.
My next appointment is in seven weeks. I plan on three appointments between trips, so it “should” work out well. We shall see, however. If I have learned nothing else from this process, it is that “should” seldom works out to “does.” I read some of my between visit thoughts, and cannot believe how completely different they are than what happens at that salon visit!
Shesh I don’t know what happened, but less than a month after this appointment my hair looks dark blonde/light brown, even where it is silver. I have no idea what is going on, probably my eyes not seeing the gray colors clearly, but I am ready for this process to be over. I can definitely see why people give up and go back to the dye bottle or simply hack it all off to start fresh.
I have a theory that it was because my purple shampoo was really old, and ordered new shampoo for silver hair hoping that it keeps the brassy at bay.
Note: This is the eighth in a series of posts about my gray hair transition journey. I hope you will stay with me for my monthly (or quarterly) updates on the highs, and lows, of transitioning to grey/silver/white. My multicolored hair journey!
● Transitioning Dyed Red Hair to Gray: All My Steps One Year Mark
● Transitioning Dyed Red Hair to Gray: All My Steps This is my initial post that includes all the in-depth research I did when coming to the decision to go gray.
● Transitioning Dyed Red Hair to Gray: All My Steps, Part 2 Lots and lots of highlights and low-lights
● Transitioning Dyed Red Hair to Gray: All My Steps, Part 3 more highlights, and finally some gray!
● Transitioning Dyed Red Hair to Gray: All My Steps, Part 4 The start of visible natural gray.
● Transitioning Dyed Red Hair to Gray: All My Steps, Part 5 – A bad month
● Transitioning Dyed Red Hair to Gray: All My Steps, After The Fall – This is what happened after I had a major fall.
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