Color Oops – Haircolor Remover

Sometimes, well-intentioned hair color ideas can be more hare-brained than hair-savvy, and you’re left with a color that’s at best not what you were thinking; at worst a tragic mistake .  What seemed like a great idea in your head may not be how your colorist interpreted your enthused description of “exactly” what you were envisioning.  (A description mishap with a new stylist put me in this category).  Or maybe you were playing with box color from a drugstore.

Either way, the prospect of getting rid of an unwanted haircolor can be downright intimidating. Do you spend the big bucks at a salon getting it corrected? What if their idea of corrected is not your idea of corrected?  Ohhhhh.  Or do you try to cover it up with another dye? (Hint: No. Unless really dark hair is what you were going for).  What if the answer is….none of the above?

The dark hair with ash and reddish-coppery highlights that had replaced my completely co-opted JLo warm “bronde” locks were not working out.

Now, I come from a family of gorgeous dark brunette sisters, so dark hair with a few highlights  should be a no-brainier.  But it just wasn’t….me.  It made me sad (no, this is not logical. Yes, it was real).   I was loathe to go back in and get it stripped  out with bleach, as I was afraid of causing more damage since the color change had only been a few weeks ago.  But now I was getting icky grey roots that needed covering , and I knew that I better get back to my prefered base color but quick.  Time for Google!

I saw a product called Color Oops, which says that in 20 minutes saturated on your hair,

it will shrink all artificial dye molecules into tiny little spheres that will slip out of your hair as you rinse it, leaving your color at the lightest point that you had it colored to. And because there is no bleach, there would be no damage.   This sounded great!  And maybe just a little too good to be true.  But there was a catch:  for it to work, I would be standing in the shower rinsing my hair for a total of 3 shampoos and 35 minutes solid.  If this step is skimped on, the color molecules will revert back to their original, unshrunken size and your unwanted darker color will “reappear”.  My first thought:

Does this product have gluten?  Am I going to be standing there in a shower for 35 minutes as some well-meaning, “conditioning”, wheat-germ oil encased,  ejected dye molecules stream all over my lips and face?   I had just discovered that my haircolor developer (Sally Ion) was proudly enriched with wheat protein.  (It’s printed right on the front of the bottle.  And the back lists “wheat gluten” as an ingredient.)

Clearly, I hadn’t been paying attention, as I have used this for years.  Awesome…NOT!  So my hair color is a product to be washed out very carefully.  But who can be that careful for 35 minutes under a shower head?

Luckily, Color Oops contains no gluten ingredients and  is safe for Celiacs that make hair dye oopsies!

So does it work?  The short answer is yes.  It works very well.

I was honestly expecting patchy orange and red and yellow and grey hair after the dark haircolor was removed, but that’s not what happened.  It just made the dark dye go away, along with the coppery highlights, leaving my hair a slightly-lighter color than it had been before it got dyed darker.  And that’s all.  My haircolor was far more even than I had expected. Back to JLo “bronde”!

While after 3 shampoos and 35 minutes of rinsing you’re going to need to slather on a nice deep conditioner for at least 15 mins, the texture of my hair was as before.  Color Oops lives up to its claims:  it will take your hair to the lightest color that it has been lifted to by removing the darker hair dye molecules (obviously, it won’t remove lighter dyes  because, well, you’ve lightened with them).

So if you need to say sayonara to haircokor that’s no longer doing it for you, Color Oops will do the heavy lifting….without wrecking your hair or  glutening you in the process!