Color Me Persian Brown

One languorous high-school summer, I lost a high-stakes bet with two close friends. As punishment, they would dye my hair a color of their choosing, my mother’s certain horror be damned. Luckily for me, our neighborhood Walgreens didn’t stock the more outrageous Manic Panic [2] primary colors, but my friends did manage to choose a sufficiently Goth shade of purplish-black. Though I grumbled, I was not uninterested in what I’d look like with witch-black hair. And so I sat stoically on the toilet while my friends squirted the solution all over my scalp (and all nearby bathroom tiles). I still remember the anticipation: getting into the shower, applying the deep conditioning treatment, and then waiting nervously for the transformation to take place.

An hour later, when my hair had dried, it looked ... exactly the same. The stinky goop that had promised to turn my reddish-brown hair a dramatic raven black had done exactly nothing at all. My friends and I were stupefied. We had followed the instructions to the letter, left the solution in a full 45 minutes—why did we have nothing to show for our efforts but a trashed bathroom?

I’ve never lingered in the hair-dye aisle of the drugstore since, but after seeing several stories on the impact of the recession [3] on hair salons—15 percent of 1,000 serial hair-dyers surveyed [4] said they now color their hair at home instead of at the salon—I began to wonder if perhaps home dye kits had improved since the mid-’90s. The savings are certainly significant: These kits go for about $10, while color treatments at salons can cost anywhere from $70 to $250. Were these products any good?

Methodology

I picked a similar shade—a basic brown about three shades darker than my natural color—from five different companies: two from the natural foods store, two from CVS, and one from Sephora. The kits ranged in price from $3 to $30.

I enlisted the help of a friend who has dyed her hair at home before. Before the testing, her hair was a brassy reddish-blond, so (we hoped) the dyes would have a more extreme effect on her. We separated the bottom layers of our hair into five sections and over the course of a long holiday weekend set about transforming our tresses, plot by plot, on the cheap.

Ease of Application (10 points): Does applying the color require an advanced degree from the Vidal Sassoon Academy? Does it have any special applicator wands, or do you apply it straight from the bottle? How long do you have to leave the color on?

Color Quality (10 points): Does the hair color actually, you know, color the hair? And if so, is the color attractive and natural-looking, or does the hair turn a radioactive shade of purple under direct sunlight?

Value (10 points): Does the home kit offer ample savings of money (and time), or will the intrepid DIY dyer end up blowing more cash repairing the damage, as my own hairdresser believes inevitably happens?

Here are the results of our experiment, from noxious to knockout.

Rainbow Henna Persian Dark Brown [5], $5.87
This health food store product is bare-bones to the extreme, consisting of a little pot of claylike glop and that’s it. You can forget about any “extras”—gloves, mixing container, conditioning after-treatment—with the Rainbow Henna. I had to sacrifice a salad bowl ($7), mixing spoon ($3), and dishwashing gloves ($2) to concoct a substance that could reasonably spread across the scalp, making the $6 dye seem like less of a steal.

Though my friend and I unhappily agreed that the mixture looked and smelled like the perfect marriage of kelp and human excrement, we dutifully smeared the henna into our hair and waited the prescribed eternity of 45 minutes for the color to kick in. But alas, when the time came to rinse, it might as well have been the summer of 1995 all over again: The henna did absolutely zilch in the color department. My hair looked exactly the same as before, and so did my friend’s. I’ve read about some tricks to intensify the effects of henna, like rinsing your hair with coffee grinds, but you shouldn’t have to play MacGyver to pull off a decent home coloring job. Next.

Ease of Application: 1
Color Quality: 1
Value: 3
Total: 5

Naturtint Permanent Hair Colorant Dark Chestnut Brown [6], $14.95
I’m all for au naturel personal-care products—my shampoo, toothpaste, and even deodorant are always low- to non-toxic. But when it comes to hair color, I’ve found that Mother Nature doesn’t always know best. Naturtint is much closer to your standard home color kit than the hopelessly primitive Rainbow Henna. The kit comes with an applicator bottle, gloves, and conditioner—everything you might expect. There’s no comb to distribute the concoction over your scalp, but otherwise, this “chemically light” vegetable hair color is commendably unintimidating to amateurs. The gluelike odor didn’t even really bother me. The problem, again, was the quality of the color. After 30 minutes, my hair was a little darker, but the difference was very, very slight. While the effect was more visible on my friend’s lighter hair, she reported that the color had all but vanished after five showers.

Ease of Application: 5
Color Quality: 3
Value: 3
Total: 12

Revlon Colorsilk Dark Brown [7], $3.48
Of all the products I tested, this bargain-basement product looks (and smells) most like your grandmother’s good old-fashioned hair dye. The conditioning treatment is a little cheapo—it comes in a single-use, ketchup-style squirt packet—but otherwise the Colorsilk product has all the fixings of a standard home hair kit, with gloves and a self-contained mixing/applicator bottle. Again, the delicate task of distributing the color evenly is left to the user’s wiles, but that’s pretty much par for the course with these kits, as is the 25-minute wait time. And if the resulting color was a little flat, there was nothing horrific or offensive about it. For the suspiciously low price, we were not unimpressed.

Ease of Application: 5
Color Quality: 5
Value: 8
Total: 18

Frederic Fekkai Salon Color in Darkest Brown [8], $30
Introduced earlier this year as a direct response to the recent uptick in sales of home-coloring kits, the Fekkai home-coloring kit has all sorts of extras to justify its deluxe price: pretreatment cream, a handy mixing bowl, the requisite accent over the word “crème,” and—most useful of all—an application brush with legitimate bristles. The chemical solution was the least repulsive-smelling of all that we tried, and the “bowl and brush” technique made application fairly foolproof. (Fairly, I say: I accidentally painted a thin strip of peach fuzz on my cheek, and a month later, I’m still glancing in the mirror and gasping to think I’ve contracted the “Wolfman” gene [9].) After leaving the mixture on for 35 minutes, we were both wowed by the change in our hair color. My hair turned one shade lighter than black, my friend’s a believable dark brown. A month later, I can see only a hint of my natural color beneath the shiny black.

But for all those advantages, the price still seems a little steep to me. While appreciably less than the $70-plus you’d spend at the salon, $30 is not nothing. Many beauty-school dye jobs cost about the same: The Aveda Institute [10] in my neighborhood offers color treatments starting at $32, or almost exactly the same price (tip not included) as the Fekkai kit. So unless you’re an advanced home dyer, you might be better off saving up for a salon trip.

Ease of Application: 9
Color Quality: 9
Value: 1
Total: 19

Clairol Nice ‘N Easy Perfect 10 Dark Brown [11], $13.99
Clairol sets the bar high for this product, calling it “the first fundamental change in the basic chemistry of hair coloring in 50 years.” While I can’t speak to its chemistry, I will say that Perfect 10 was almost insultingly easy to use, the total home-hair-color-for-dummies option. My friend and I mixed and applied the dye, which reeked of car-service air freshener over the span of a single Geico commercial. You just squirt one tube into a bottle, shake, attach a plastic comb, and then squeeze out the color as you run the comb through your hair. Each bristle of the comb has two holes in it, a clever design that distributes the mixture evenly through the hair. But the biggest selling point of all is the wait time: a mere 10 minutes, ideal for the ADD set. And the price—though higher than other drugstore options like Garnier Color Breaks [12], which sells for about $7.99, and the even cheaper Colorsilk line—is by no means extortionate in light of the convenience factor. Most importantly, my friend and I both liked the color—a little less shiny than the Fekkai, but rich and convincingly professional-looking nonetheless.

Ease of Application: 10
Color Quality: 8
Value: 7
Total: 25

The Verdict

While impressed by how far they’ve come since I was in high school, I can still understand my hairdresser’s disdain for home coloring kits. It’s not just that I distrust my own fitness to handle strong, potentially appearance-ruining chemicals. It’s that home hair coloring involves a scary amount of trial and error, both in terms of the application process and the color itself. We were never quite sure what our hair would look like when we emerged from the shower. The results were never quite the same on both of us, and never quite identical to the color shown on the product packaging, either. Though my friend enjoys this element of surprise, I remain a bit too timid for such high-risk experimentation. If I were really desperate to color my hair without breaking the bank, I’d opt for Perfect 10. For now, though, I’m going with the cheapest solution of all, and that’s sticking with my natural color.