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What kind of colours are ash tones

What kind of colours are ash tones? The theory behind dyeing your hair.

Ash tones are often used to surpress an orange tone. An ash tone is a cool tone. It can look a little blue, and it's a matter colour than a natural or warm tone. Men often use ash tones.

What kind of colour is an ash tone

To understand what kind of colour ash tones are, we have to look into the theory of hairdye. The primary colours are red, blue and yellow. When you mix these colours, you'll get green, orange or purple. These are the secondary colours. Ash tones are often used to surpress an orange tone. If you have a lot of natural warmth in your hair, you'll probably relate to this. After dyeing, you'll see that your hair has an orange glow. The colour wheel shows that opposing colours neutralise each other. Orange and blue are opposite colours, so to get rid of an orange glow you need to use blue. Ash tones contain blue pigment, because they're cool colours. The darker the ash colour, the more obvious you can see the blue tone. Our 4.1 ash dark brown also has a blue glow.

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Using the colour wheel to dye

Colours can be sorted into cool and warm colours (tones). Warm colours are at the yellow, orange and red half of the colour wheel. Cool colours are more green, blue, and purple are on the other half of the colour wheel.

Someone with a warm facial complexion will have a yellow, red or orange undertone in their skin. Warm tones (golden, copper) will look better. People with a cool facial complexion with a blue/pink undertone will look best with cool (ash)tones.

Hair colours are divided into numbers. The darkest colour is 1, black. The higher the first digit of the number, the lighter the colour. The lightest colour WECOLOUR has to offer is 13,95. Next to the dot there's another number. This second digit shows whether the colour is warm or cool. For example, a .1 is always an ash tone because it has added blue pigment. Colours with .3 are golden tones because they have added yellow pigment. The .4 colours have a little more orange and will turn copper, and so on. This way you can always mix your own hair colour, if we don't have the right colour for you. All dye colours can be mixed.

So in conclusion, an ash tone is a cool colour with a blue undertone that prevents your hair from getting too orange or too warm. We have 7 different ash colours, ranging from dark brown to blonde. We also have an extra ashy colour, the 10.11. The 9.13 is an ash tone with a little bit of extra gold, which will turn to a sand colour.

How to decide which colour is best for you

When making such a decision, you need to take into account if your hair is dyed already or if you're going to be dyeing your natural hair. There's a big difference between natural and dyed hair: natural, undyed hair has a natural pigment, while dyed hair has artificial pigment. You can't dye dyed hair any lighter, unless you decolourise it first. Decolourising is commonly known as bleaching and is used to lighten up the pigment in your hair by weakening any pigment that's in your hair and getting rid of it. So if your hair has been dyed, always pick a colour with the same colour value or darker, since a lighter colour isn't going to make any differences.

You can easily determine what your own natural colour is. Depending on the product you're using, you can dye your natural hair lighter. Our hair dye will be able to lighten up your natural hair. With all of our dye, there's a bottle 6% hydrogen peroxide included (the developer) which will be able to lighten your hair up to 1-2 colour levels lighter. If you want it lighter than that, we also have the 11.1 very light ash blonde. This colour has 9% hydrogen peroxide included which will be able to lighten up your hair 3 colour levels lighter. We could also send you the 11.1 with a 12% developer, so your hair can lighten up 4 colour levels. Our hair colour advice tool will help you figure out what's the best choice for you. 

What to watch out for with ash tones

Next to the colour value, it's also important to take a look at the texture (thickness) and porosity of your hair. These two factors affect the amount of dye that will be absorbed into your hair and on the application time of the dye. Thick hair feels like wool, medium thick hair feels like cotton and fine hair feels like silk. If your hair gets all tangled up often, looks dull or is difficult to work with, it's possible that you have damaged hair. Porous hair means that the hair can't keep any moisture because the hair cuticles are open. Damaged and fine, porous hair absorbs more dye, with a very dark hair colour as a result. The dye will also fade from your hair more quickly. The healthier your hair, the better the dye will 'stick' and the longer the colour will look good. Keep all this in mind when deciding on a colour. Thick hair, on the other hand, will have more difficulty absorbing the dye. To make it easier, you could pre-pigment your hair: mix the colourcream with water and apply this to your hair. Let it sit for 5 minutes before you continue dyeing your hair as usual.

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