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 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 on hair salons—15 percent of 1,000 serial hair-dyers surveyed 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, $5.87
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.