DIY: hair toner

Hey all,

You know what is being better then a blonde? A good blonde! ghaha. Being blonde can be a difficult process to get the right shade and tone. When going blonde, there is probably going to be bleach involved. Bleach takes out pigments of the hair and making it lighter, it isn’t adding any color. This can leave you with brassy, orange and yellow tones. Because we don’t want that, we have to add pigments to the hair again. To make sure that you will get a nice cool blonde we add the opposite colors of the color wheel.

color wheel

So, perhaps, when your hair turned really orange, you want to use toning products with a more blue base than purple. Purple will still work, but the blue tones work optimal. That doesn’t mean that when your hair turned orange that you can’t use purple shampoo. Just look for a more blue-purple shampoo rather than pink-purple shampoo.

But, today we aren’t making shampoo, but conditioner/toner. It is really easy and cheap to make at home. It can save you a lot of money.

The stuff you will need:

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-Conditioner, doesn’t matter how cheap. Mine was 1.72 euros!

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-Vegetable or gel-based dye, in a blue or purple color.

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-A funnel

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-A bowl to mix

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-And a mixing brush 🙂

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Mixing the color:

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Pour all the conditioner in the bowl. With everything, I mean: EVERYTHING! ghaha

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Than you will ad the tinniest amount of dye to it, and start mixing.

After mixing it looked kind off like this:

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A very light blue. I wanted more purple, but I was almost out, and instead of using all of it up, I used a very little bit of pink 🙂

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Now that I think of it, it wasn’t such a great idea because it turned out to purple…So why not just add more blue!

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It turned out the color that I wanted, but it was still quite light, and for optimal toning I wanted it to be a bit  darker. If you try this yourself, start of really light and test it on a piece of your hair. This way you’ll make sure that you don’t end up with having blue-purple hair.

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So this is the final color. It is a more blue tone which is fine. This will tone the brassy orange tones.

Putting it back in the bottle :S

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It will be a messy process!

Put the funnel in the conditioner bottle and start by pouring in the conditioner. After that put the pump back on, and shake very well. Shake shake shake, shake the bottle! And than you’re done! Yeaaah!

Testing it?

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Here you can see the extension which I’m going to tone. It is a very golden honey-blonde.

After letting the conditioner sit for 5 minutes:

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It is a cooler toned blonde 🙂

Comparison:

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Looks good, right?

Hope it was helpful!

xoxo, Marlon

23 thoughts on “DIY: hair toner

    • I’ve seen someone do it on youtube and it worked out fine. I would recommend to try it on a strand first before doing a whole head. let me know if it worked. 🙂

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    • I would suggest rinsing it out with just cold water, Shampoo may wash away some off toner. You can leave it in as long as you want to. It isn’t damaging. How longer you leave it in how better the results will be. 🙂

  3. my blonde hair is white in the tips but yellowish on the scalp, so if i put blue shampoo on it, will thw white strands of my hair turn blue ?

    • Yess, the white strands would rurn blue… But what you can do is coat the white parts of your hair with a heavy conditioner. This way, they can’t really absorb the dye pigments anymore. And I would still try to only get the toner on the yellow parts. 🙂

    • Heyyy,

      The yellow parts would maybe tone down a bit. But the orange parts really have to be lighter if you want to tone your hair with food colouring. I understand that if your hair is yellow and orange, it was probably a dark colour and you have bleached the heck out of it and don’t wan’t to lighten it any further. What I would do is go on ebay and get: “Redken shades eq” in the colour 7t/7v. This will get even very orange pigmented hair toned and it is still very soft on the hair. I used it yesterday to dye my light blonde pieces gray. It’s perfect!

      Xoxo Marlon

  4. Hey there, very interesting post! Will this work the same if I use shampoo instead of conditioner? (Cause shampoo can be distributed more evenly on my hair) Would that make it last less (than 6 shampoos)?
    I hope you answer! ❤

    • Heyyy,

      Yes it would still work. But the results will be less great. Shampoo molecules do not really stick as well to the hair as conditioner molecules do. And to get a good toning you would have to leave it in for a long time, and that could be drying for your hair if you are using shampoo. But I’ll say; “Don’t nock it till you try it!”

      Xoxo Marlon

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