So, you’ve gone and done it, you’ve colored your hair BLACK, and you hate it! Don’t panic just yet, help IS available! For this article’s sake, I’m going to assume you colored your hair yourself at home using a black box dye from Sally’s or the drugstore (only because a hairdresser would have probably successfully talked you out of it), and now struggle to remove permanent dye from your locks. Without any further frowns or judgments, let me just tell you your do’s and don’ts.

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Consider This Before You Try to Remove the Hair Dye

There are many common ways to remove hair dye from your locks, but the task is the most difficult if you deal with black hair color (and definitely not for the faint-hearted). Here is why.

Black is the deepest, darkest color we have on our color chart, and the shades go up from there: through darkest brown, medium brown, darkest blonde, medium blonde up to blonde and then light blonde. When you color your hair black, you are filling the cortex of the hair with color molecules that bond to the inside of the hair, and then expand, causing them to lock in place.

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If you went to a professional salon to have your hair colored black from blonde (ouch!), your colorist would have first filled the hair with an orange/yellow filler, to give the black color molecules something to anchor to, and then colored the black on top of it. If you did it yourself, you probably skipped all of that and might have a good chance of getting the color that’s dull and lifeless and far from the goal like this.

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To map out the right way to remove dye from your hair or at least lighten it, it’s vital to consider what color your hair was prior to you coloring it black. If you were a highlighted blonde and you just applied a permanent black hair dye over it, it’s going to be much more difficult for you to get the color out without causing damage. However, if you started with dark brown hair or even medium blonde natural color (no previous bleaching), lightening hair will be not that difficult. So, here are the options.