Guide
What is color safe shampoo?
A colour-safe shampoo is a shampoo made for coloured or chemically treated hair. It uses milder cleansers that take less of the hair’s own oil, and it conditions well. If your hair is bleached or permanently coloured, we’d choose a colour-safe shampoo.
If you are planning a new colour, our hair colour page shows what we offer. What washing and sun do to colour you already have is in our guide to colour treated hair care.
Why does coloured hair hold on to conditioning?
Charge comes as negative or positive, and opposite charges pull together. Bleach and permanent colour leave each hair more negatively charged on the outside and more porous, which means more open to what touches it. Many of the conditioning ingredients in shampoo carry a positive charge, so a more negative surface pulls them in harder. That is why bleached or permanently coloured hair holds on to them more strongly than untouched hair.
What does conditioning do?
Conditioning ingredients flatten the outer layer of each hair. A flatter surface throws back more light, so hair looks shinier and colour looks brighter. A shampoo without them can leave hair more tangled.
Washing coloured hair at home
- Put the shampoo on your scalp and rinse it down through the lengths. The scalp is where oil and build-up collect, and the lengths dry out less this way.
- Leave baby shampoo for babies if your hair is coloured, especially bleached. Baby shampoo is made first of all to spare the eyes, so conditioning the hair takes second place.
- Finish with conditioner. The rest of the home care is in our guide to frizzy hair in humidity.
Your first step
If your colour looks dull or your hair tangles after washing, start with a shampoo made for coloured hair and conditioner after it. If your scalp gets oily fast in the heat, wash whenever it feels oily, with the shampoo on the scalp.
If you’d like to come in, you can book here.