Whether it’s hi-lights, placement colour, balayage or bleaching a whole head, the same process is needed.

To try and explain how bleach and lightening products work, is fairly simple, however, in practice, things don’t always go according to plan.

Hair doesn’t always behave in the way we would expect, or a customer may have used a home box dye which is incompatible with professional products.

Added to that, customer expectations cannot always be matched with the reality of lightening hair.

In short, the darker your natural colour, the harder it is to lift to a decent blonde.

There is a longer answer of course and is something that has many angles to it.

There is a widely used numbering system for hair colourant and broadly speaking, ones hair colour falls into numbers 1 to 10.

1 being the darkest.

Anybody that has hair colour from 7-10, will see the best results from the lightening process because the lightener, has less work to do and less tone to lift out.

For those with depth 1-6, the lightener has a lot more work to do. Hair is made up of many colour pigments and during the lightening process, the last tones to lift out are copper tones. Everyone has these tones in their hair unless they are pure white. It’s not always possible to tell whose hair has a greater degree of copper or warm tone until you come to the service itself. This makes it difficult to guarantee or promise the desired colour.

Bleach will lift out the hairs natural colour and the oxidising agent reaches deep into the hair cortex and neutralises the tone.

The longer it’s left in the hair, the lighter it will go but this is where damage can be done. To minimize the effects of the harsh bleach, it is best to keep it on the hair for the minimum amount of time and not compromise the hairs condition.

The whole process can be repeated to reach the desired effect but it can take 2 or 3 attempts to get the colour light enough.

This can be difficult for clients and there is the extra cost factor involved. It’s always best to underpromise and over deliver where colouring hair is concerned.