Color-Depositing Shampoos

Color-depositing shampoo is just what it sounds like: it’s a tinted shampoo that leaves some extra pigment on your already-colored hair. The temporary colorant in these hair cleaners is not as powerful as what you’ll find in hair dyes. Still, most formulas are sufficient to minimize fading, refresh highlights, and revive dull and muted colors.

To help hide gray on dark hair or highlights, use a blue-tinted shampoo. There are purple-tinted shampoos for those with blonde hair, black and browns for those hair colors and even red to keep your ginger color fresh. All these can help mask gray hairs.

Mascara

Desperate times call for drastic measures. If you’re really in a pinch and need an on-the-fly solution to cover gray on dark hair, then try a little mascara. Be careful though, mascara, even the water-resistant kind, can stain, so remember not to touch it after you’ve applied it. Nothing more embarrassing than brown smudges on your fingers and forehead!

There are mascaras that are made just for hair, too. Sometimes they use flamboyant colors, but they also have muted colors that can hide your grays. 

Camouflage Techniques

If you want to cover the gray on your dark hair but you don’t want to use a coloring product, you can also consider these even less invasive camouflage options:

Change your part

Gray hairs like to hang out in the most noticeable spots. So they usually are located right on the hairline and on your part. You can defeat those gray hairs by changing your part to another area of your head where they’re not yet as noticeable.

Headband

You’ll see gray roots grow back at the front, of course. Gray hairs on the hairline are sometimes the most resistant to color, but there are ways to hide them. If you have gray hair peeking out around your head, put on a headband. If your headband doesn’t fit the area exactly as you want it to, use it as a scarf.