Top Ten Reasons Hair Color Box Kits Suck

Or... Do you honestly think Heather Locklear shops at Walmart for hair color?

1. When shooting the photos for boxes, they don't use 1 color, they use multiple. Applying 2 or 3 different types of colors to produce results is common. Finished photos are fabrications - from an arsenal of hair tricks accumulated over years by hair professionals.
2. Directions on some kits promote "fast" processing. Professional color requires 45-55 minutes, taking that amount of time to work correctly - period. Do not look for "fast" hair color. The technology does not work that way, and incorrect coverage will result.
3. Kits leave public to believe that anyone with any color hair will end up with the photo on the front. None make proper exclusions - MUST be exclusions. For example: Light blonde boxed kits should say, "Customers with level 1 - 5 virgin hair should not use this Tint. - Please use 'such and such a color.'" Is that really so bad?
4. Manufacturers have chosen one volume of developer for customers hair without knowing the level it is. When formulating hair color properly, the color of hair one begins with must be part of the equation - first and foremost. No where does it say that on the box. With many different volumes of developer available for formulating hair color, manufacturers cannot pick one (put it in kit) without knowing the clients virgin hair color. That's leaving a crucial amount of information out of the equation - period.
5. Kits do not clarify the category of hair color they are, and customers are mis-led. There are 4 categories of hair color, and each hair color must fit in one. Otherwise how to you know what you are using? One manufacturer of boxed hair color kits (Clairol) claims to be a "non-permanent" hair color on the front of the box... ??? This is not a hair color category! The categories are: Temporary - they only sit on the surface of your hair and rinse right out. Semi-permanent - last 4-8 shampoos depending on how porous your hair is. Demi-permanent - last 6-8 weeks and tend to fade off slowly. And Permanent color - intended to last as long as the hair on your head, including covering grey completely. FYI: no hair color is completely permanent. All hair color fades - every single one. But as I said before, no color is ever truly out of your hair (fading or otherwise) until it is cut out!!
6. The charts and instructions on the box are confusing and meaningless, professionals cannot figure out what they mean or the goals.
7. One of the most important things you learn in beauty school about hair color is "color cannot lift color." This means that if you have a dark color on your hair, not your natural color, but an artificial color, there is no "color" that is going to make that lighter. You have to use something to lift it (make it lighter) which is usually bleach. So let's say you colored your hair a medium level 5 brown for the winter, and now that it's spring time you want it blonde. You cannot use even a highlift blonde color to do it. And let's say too that you have newgrowth. Well, that newgrowth, since it is your natural color and doesn't have artificial color on it, will lift, but the rest of it - the hair with color on it - won't. That's what we call "hot roots."
8. Almost all boxed kits tell you that if you are just touching up your newgrowth the same color, that you should put it on your newgrowth only, and maybe run it through the ends the last 5 minutes of the process. But with these new brands of color, including the foam kinds, how is that possible? Anytime you run color on top of color on top of color, the darker (or lighter, depending on what you're using) it's going to get. Thus making it harder to get out of your hair later on. I can't tell you how many times I've had a client tell me "I've been using this color for years and all of a sudden my ends are black." Yeah. Go figure.
9. Boxed kits only come with a certain amount of hair color. If you have short hair, most of it can go to waste, and you end up dumping it down the drain. If you have thick, long hair, you may need to use 2 or 3 boxes, thus spending around the same amount of money as you would have at a salon.
10. And finally, why stress about trying to figure out what and how to do it? Isn't it so much easier to just find a picture of what you want, take it into your stylist, and say, "I want this." ? Your stylist can figure it out, taking the pressure off of you, and if it doesn't turn out exactly as you imagined, it's on the stylist and not on you to fix it. If you screw it up, and have to go to a stylist to fix it, color correction can get pretty pricey, and it rarely looks perfect after the first process. I've done color correction before that's taken over 9 hours over the course of two days and cost almost $300. Spare yourself the headache and let the pros handle it. ;)