I naturally have very dark brown hair, for the past year or so I’ve had at least some blonde in my hair. Anyone that has bleached their hair knows how hard it is to keep it looking salon fresh. Bleached hair is toned to make it look prettier, and eventually that tone fades out leaving you with a copper-brassy-UGLY look. If you don’t want to spend tons of money every month to re-tone it…. I have the perfect solution.

Purple Shampoo. Purple shampoo cancels out the copper tones and leaves you with a cleaner, brighter looking blonde. Many say that you just wash your hair with this every day and that will do this trick, I haven’t found that to be the case. It helps but doesn’t fix it.

Here’s my process:

Joico Color Balance

I use this Joico Purple Toning Shampoo, which I buy from Ulta. It runs around $15 a bottle and lasts me around a month.

I wash with this every day as recommend but I also do more than that. Once a week I do a deep tone. On completely dry hair, I pack the shampoo on. I make sure every blonde spot is fully saturated and I leave it on for 20 minutes to half an hour then shampoo as normal. I wouldn’t recommend leaving it too much longer than that because I’ve seen videos of girls accidentally giving their hair a purple tint and that’s obviously not the goal. I’ve found complete success with this and I can get my color to last months longer than it does without the shampoo. They also make conditioner which I’ve never used but I assume it would only make the effect better if you’re willing to spend the extra money.