Why your balayage turned orange

Almost every week someone sits down and says a version of the same sentence: it looked right in the salon, and by the third wash it was orange. They usually assume they were sold the wrong colour. They were not. In most cases the colour was never lifted far enough in the first place.

What brass actually is

Dark hair does not contain one pigment. Underneath the brown sits a band of warm pigment — red, then orange, then yellow — and lightener has to travel through all of it. Stop in the middle of that band and the warmth underneath is simply what you are left looking at. Toner can cover it for a few washes. It cannot remove it, because there is nothing to remove; the warmth is the hair's own pigment showing through.

That is why the orange appears on a timetable rather than immediately. The toner washes out on schedule, and what was always underneath comes back.

Why it is corrected over two sittings

The instinct is to put more colour on top. On brassy hair that usually produces something muddy, because you are layering a cool pigment over a warm one and hoping they cancel. What is actually needed is to finish the lift that was abandoned — and hair that has already been processed cannot take that in one afternoon without paying for it in condition.

• First sitting: lift the remaining warmth out, only as far as the hair will tolerate.
• A gap of two to three weeks, so the hair recovers before it is asked to do anything else.
• Second sitting: tone to the shade you actually wanted, on a base that can now hold it.

It is slower than anyone wants. It is also the difference between a colour that holds and one that turns again by next month.

What to ask before you book

Ask how many sittings the correction will take, and be suspicious of one. Ask what your hair's current level is and what level the target shade needs — if those two numbers are far apart, one appointment is not honest. And bring a photograph of the colour before it went wrong, not only of what you want; where it started tells a colourist more than where you hoped to end up.