You’ve bleached your hair. Everything went well, and you didn’t fry any of it off. You’ve washed it, expecting to find a nice light blonde, or maybe even a soft yellow. Instead, you see orange.

How did this happen, and what can you do about it?

Don’t worry. Many people have experienced unexpected outcomes when coloring their hair. Orange hair isn’t uncommon, and it’s not difficult to fix. You can go to a salon for color correction, or you can learn to fix orange hair with box dye at home.

Why Is Your Hair Orange?

To fully understand why hair can end up orange, we’ll have to take a quick dive into genetics. The reasons for the orange color after an unsuccessful dye job usually involve the following terms:

• Genotype: the specific gene sequence you end up with as a result of the ones your parents have.
• Phenotype: the physical, visual manner in which a gene presents itself.
• Melanocytes: the cells that contain pigments, such as in hair, eyes, and skin.
• Eumelanin: the pigment largely responsible for brown and black. In small quantities, it causes yellowish-blonde and gray hair.
• Pheomelanin: the red pigment that causes red hair, and when mixed with small amounts of eumelanin causes blonde or strawberry blonde hair.

Most people have a bit of both eumelanin and pheomelanin present in their hair. The intensity of each one determines the visible hair color. When most of the pigment is stripped away in bleaching, what remains is a lighter version of the base pigment.

If your base pigment is high in pheomelanin, bleaching may result in orange hair.

Before Fixing Your Orange Hair…

Given the variety of phenotypes for hair color, how do you determine your major underlying pigment? You may be thinking that since you have very dark hair, obviously you have more eumelanin and will therefore have blonde hair if you bleach it.