I hear people talking about getting their hair done all time. Every time I mention that I am stylist they start playing with their hair and talking about what they want to do with it. So often I hear them say that they want to color their hair but the in the next sentence they are talking about frosting it or lightening it. It gets very confusing to us stylist when the terminology is off a little and with that confusion can come a bad service. Hopefully explaining the difference between the types of colors will help you to communicate to your stylist exactly what you would like to have done.
First I want to give you some back ground on how we see color. Some of you may have already had some kind of a biology or science class where you learned about how we see it but I am going to explain for those who haven't. The color that you see with your eye actually comes through light. The whole color spectrum is contained within light and the color that your eyes see is the color that is allowed to pass through or reflect off an object. When you see white you are seeing everything in the color spectrum and when you see black you are seeing no light pass through. It is a hard concept to grasp so let me see if I can give you a better example. You could think of a prism or a rainbow, when light passes through something clear like water or a crystal it is refracted or broken up. That is why when you see it, you see the colors separately. When you see browns or other colors that are not in the rainbow you are seeing the mixture of colors, more than one color is let through the object.
Hair works the same way. Black hair isn't letting any light pass through and white blonde or platinum is letting all the colors through. When hair is shiny it means that the color is coming through clearer, there is nothing blocking any of the light or the color. The more color molecules in the hair the darker or richer the color. Grey hair has a few molecules left and white hair has no color molecules at all. The reason that natural grey or white hair is so stubborn is because there is nothing blocking those center bonds in the hair, so they kind of puff up cause they have the room. Less needs to be squeezed into the hair shaft when it is being made.
Now that you have a little bit of an understanding of how color works with your eyes, let me explain how the chemicals work with your hair and how the color spectrum works in this case.
When the stylist is choosing which product to use on your hair, the tube of color that would best work for you, they should be thinking about what color molecules are already in your hair and which ones they need to add. For instance, if you looked at a color wheel, the ones you probably saw in grade school, with the colors of the rainbow, you would notice that with it in a circle there is a color directly across from every other color. Looking at the color wheel, if your hair contained say a red or orange quality and you wanted it less red or orange you would use a color that contained the color directly opposite of the red or orange, which in this case would be blue or green. That way when the color was deposited into your hair, the blue or green would sort of block out the red or orange. Confused yet? I hope not, let's move on.
Each color tube that we have on the shelf falls somewhere in the color spectrum on that color wheel. So in choosing a color we should be thinking about what we want the color to be when we are done. It is the hardest part of doing a color because sometimes the lighting in the salons can be unnatural and not all the colors are shining through your hair shaft. I always take my clients into natural lighting before and after a color to see what colors are being let through the hair shaft. I can also tell if there is any build up I need to remove before the color by looking at the shine of the hair. Remember, if it's not shiny, then the light is being blocked, kind of like curtains on a window. You may have noticed yourself if you have had the color of your hair changed or maybe even if you haven't, that it looks different in the sunlight than it does in your bathroom. Same with the colors of your make up. You probably wear different colors during the day than you do if you go out at night. It all has to do with the colors of light that are available. Bathroom lighting, or regular light bulbs have a blue-green spectrum, so again, reds and oranges won't be seen as well Fluorescent lighting has a variety in the spectrum so the colors will depend on the manufacturer and what colors are shining from the light. This also means that in a salon with florescent lighting your color will look different than it will in the natural lighting outside. A blonde head may look good in a salon and be brassy outside. So be sure you check before you leave.
