Removing hair color without bleach!

Those who know me know I love to have colorful hair! After four months of purple hair, I decided it was time to change it again. I knew I wanted to go back to mustard yellow, but it definitely wouldn't cover up purple! But, I have bleached my hair so many times that I hate to do it unnecessarily. It seemed no more color would come out with hot washes (for reference, I only wash my hair every 3 days in COLD water and with color safe shampoo), so I began looking in a hair color Facebook group for answers.

Someone suggested trying baking soda and "Purple Shampoo." Purple Shampoo is a generic thing to call any clarifying shampoo, which is usually meant to get brassy tones out of blonde hair. Unfortunately, they did not have any kind of clarifying shampoo at the store, so I looked up other options.

I ended up settling on baking soda, Dawn and dandruff shampoo, and it worked!

Baking soda by itself is a natural cleansing agent. Dawn dish detergent is a pretty tough, but safe, cleaner. Dandruff shampoo is FULL of sulfates that help fade hair color. Altogether, they make a powerhouse.

Simply add 3 tablespoons of baking soda, 4 tablespoons of dandruff shampoo, and 1 tablespoon of Dawn to a bowl, and mix it up.

The result looks like blue shampoo.

Apply the mix on dry hair, and leave it on for about 20 minutes (I also put on a shower cap).

Rinse hair normally and you'll see a drastic amount of color come out!

Here is my before and after:

As you can see it was much more purple, and afterwards became a very faded berry color.

You can do this treatment several times to get your desired amount of lift! Please note that this only works on semi-permanent hair colors and may dry out your hair. I immediately put on a hair mask after rinsing my hair out.

I ended up purchasing some toner to lift out the last bit of color in my hair.

It made my hair practically white (again, WITHOUT bleach!), so it lifted it enough that I could color it mustard like I wanted!

Catch me with yellow hair for the next few months! And remember this trick next time you don't want to bleach just yet!

Thanks for reading!