Although purple shampoo can make your locks shiny and free of brassiness, the product can dry out your hair over time. To keep your hair healthy and soft, deep condition your hair several times a month after you use purple shampoo or when your hair begins to feel dry and frizz.
We've said it before and we'll say it again: you should always apply conditioner after shampooing your tresses.
Our purple shampoo is designed to be used as a daily shampoo until your desired color is achieved. Once you've reached your perfect blonde color, alternate between purple shampoo and your regular shampoo.
Purple shampoo can be drying, so be sure to follow up with a purple conditioner and/or your favorite color-protecting hair mask to restore lost moisture. Keep up the protection outside the shower, too.
DON'T use purple shampoo on very dry hair
“Dry areas can absorb product more which could darken the area more than desired,” says Jimmy Green, education manager for hair brands Pureology and Redken. It's important to get the hair into a healthy condition before drenching it in purple shampoo to make it less porous.
Avoid washing your mane for the first 48 to 72 hours after bleaching it. This is to give your hair enough time to seal in its new color. If you waited 72 hours before washing your hair after it was bleached, you could use the purple shampoo the next time you shower.
Use a hydrating or repair deep conditioning mask after using the violet shampoo. If your hair sucks up any of the blue/violet pigment due to the porosity don't panic. The next time you was your hair just use your regular shampoo and it will come out.
No two purple shampoos are made the same. Some are almost too potent, risking a purplish tinge after just a minute of sitting on locks, taking hair extra-ashy. Others may be too weak, meaning they need 10 minutes or more to make a noticeable difference to brassy tones if they manage to do anything at all.
Purple shampoo is for already bleached hair, so if you're hoping to lighten brown hair with purple shampoo, you'll be disappointed. This is all down to the fact that purple shampoo isn't lightening. Instead, it brightens blondes by canceling out yellow tones, which just happen to be opposite purple on the color wheel.
A purple shampoo will not dye your hair but if you leave it on for too long you could find yourself with a little lilac staining. It's easy enough to get rid of – just wash your hair with a clarifying shampoo to reduce the tint!
Keep in mind that purple shampoo does not replace your regular shampoo and should only be used once or twice a week. Doss warns that there is such a thing as too much purple. “When you eliminate too much yellow, it visually ends up darker and a lot of people don't want it to look darker,” she says.
It's important to note that the pigment in purple shampoo isn't a lightener or hair dye but a gentle toner that works overtime. So it can't darken your hair or make it any lighter. For this reason, if your hair tone is too dark, it won't make it any brighter.
The brightening effect caused by purple shampoo is actually illusionary. It happens because of an effect called bluing. While your hair might be very slightly darker than before, it will not look darker, because of the ways our eyes perceive color.
While the violet tones in purple shampoos can help bring blonde back to life, it does this by adding more toner; in effect, covering up the mineral coating on the hair cuticle. The more you shampoo with tone-correcting products, the more buildup you create — and the darker your blonde looks.
Too Much of a Good Thing: Purple Shampoo Left On Too Long
You can, in fact, over-tone your hair. Leaving purple shampoo in your hair for an hour or more can cause your hair to look dull and lifeless. To leave purple shampoo for more than 10 minutes is already too much.
The purple shampoo bottle will tell you to apply it to wet hair in the shower for 10 minutes, but the hack is to apply it to dry hair and leave it on for upwards of 15 minutes and then wash it out.
In short: No, you shouldn't put purple shampoo on dry hair. While it's true that dry hair will absorb more pigment, it's also uneven in its absorption. For most if not all of us—blonde or not—the ends tend to be drier and more porous than the rest of our hair. Ditto for any areas that were lightened with bleach.
So to have any visible color-correcting impact, the intensity of the purple in the shampoo formula has to be an inky dark dye. It stains your hair, but it's also super messy.” Yes, we know. It gets all over the bathroom, stains towels, and clothes.
Healthy fresh hair will absorb the hair color better and give you an evenly distributed hair color. Now, most dyeing kits come with conditioners themselves. So you can use conditioner right after dyeing your hair to lock in the color and ensure it lasts a long time.
DOES PURPLE SHAMPOO DAMAGE HAIR? The cool violet pigment in purple shampoo won't damage hair, but if you leave it on strands too long, those purple pigments will take their job a little too far and could turn tresses a purple-violet colour.
Purple shampoo is a toning shampoo for gray and blonde hair maintenance that works by ousting yellow brassy tones. As the name suggests, these shampoos add a purple tone that is needed to neutralize the unwanted yellow shades, making gray and blonde hair appear cleaner, brighter, or more smokey.
If your hair is actually orangey, it needs to either be colored professionally, or lifted out with lightener. Yellow hair can be helped with purple shampoo, by sometimes even that isn't enough. Hard water and other outside elements cause build up on the hair that also needs to be lifted out.
Purple shampoo is a toning shampoo used for all shades of blonde hair to help preserve its color and keep locks looking healthy and vibrant. The shampoo essentially acts as a color-correcting toner for your hair without you ever having to step foot in a salon.
If used incorrectly, "purple shampoo can stain your hair for weeks or even months,” Maine says. “It also can be very hard to remove from your hair and can cause dryness.” If you've overdone it, be patient. Purple shampoo "is a stain, so it will wash out over time,” Maine says.