My experience with La Riche Directions Hair Dye

Growing up i was like most other teens, full of angst and hormones, so when fueled with punk rock music, energy drinks and a group of ragtag rebellious friends it was pretty much inevitable that i would end up walking around head to toe in clothes from Blue Banana and Grindstore. Like most other fourteen year old emo kids at the time my life revolved around wearing as much black as i could, so being a natural blonde, it had always been in the back of my mind that my hair would look ‘way cooler’ if i dyed it black. At the time, my mother absolutely was not going to let that happen as she firmly believed i would regret it later on in life, so i turned my attention to the world of crazy colour hair.

I spent months researching online the best hair dyes that would wash out fast as my school would not allow any unnatural hair colour’s so my mom only agreed to letting me dye parts of my hair over the holiday seasons and i eventually settled on La Riche Directions hair dye.

Since i was a little kid my favorite colour had always been purple so when Christmas arrived 2013 my mom drove me town, and we purchased two pots of La Riche Directions Plum and headed to my hair dressers who had agreed to help me dip dye the ends of my hair with this “wash out” dye. We applied the dye straight onto my natural hair colour as my hair was already pretty light and my mom wanted me to avoid bleaching it at all costs. Sure enough the ends of my hair came out a rich bright purple the same colour as a Cadbury’s chocolate wrapper. I adored the colour on my hair and from what i can remember over Christmas it faded relatively quickly with little problems. Then at the end of the Christmas holiday i had my hair cut and cut off just a few inches to remove the last remaining colour from the ends of my hair before school restarted.

For a little while i was satisfied with my brief adventure into colored hair, but not for very long! Looking back on old photos bought back the urge to dye it again so summer 2014 my mom agreed once again to let me dye my hair purple and we purchased the same dye; but this time applied it to the under layers of my hair so it poked through the top layer of blonde. As before, the colour was applied straight on top of my natural blonde and it came out a beautiful Cadbury’s purple again.

Excuse the awkward emo phase selfies, it was before a time of forward facing cameras!!!!

I loved my hair with the purple underneath but as all those in the UK will know, our summer holiday is much longer than our Christmas break, so that summer my mom became my own personal hairdresser, topping up the colour in my hair every two weeks because i was adamant i did not want it to fade too early in the summer. Everything was fine until the last couple of weeks of the holiday when my mom, sister and I took a camping trip down in wales for a weekend and while spending a day at the beach i went in the sea!

If you are using, or plan on using La Riche Directions hair colour, i urge you, do not go in the sea! i tried to keep my hair out of the water as best i could but it still got dampened with sea water, so when i showered a short while later I discovered the sea water had completely stripped my hair of purple pigment and had left my hair a blue-green colour. Which at first, although i was upset i had lost the purple, it didn’t seem so bad, but in the weeks that followed the pretty blue colour became a sort of dirty green colour that just would not come out of my hair!

I tried all the home solutions, baking soda, dandruff shampoo, the vitamin C method, lemon juice; you name it we tried it, but nothing removed the colour completely! Although the colour faded over time a bit more with each couple of washes, the green stain left behind on my hair was certainly a hassle to remove and was a battle that defiantly wasn’t worth a quick dip in the sea!

For several years following this experience i did not colour my hair at all but by now i had a taste for crazy colour and knew i wanted to have brightly colored hair again some day. So during my years at sixth form i waited patiently with my natural blonde, right up until July 2016, when i finished my final year of sixth form and was released from the education system that stood between me and experimenting with crazy colours.

The very day i finished my last exam i headed to the town and purchased several pots of my favorite La Riche Directions Plum and this time, took the plunge and dyed all of hair (again straight onto my natural blonde). I adored my hair colour, it was so vibrant and shiny and Directions is a conditioning treatment so my hair felt softer than ever.

But it didn’t take long for me to realize just how quickly this colour fades when it is all over your hair! I was topping my colour up every 10 days or so to keep it vibrant and even mixing my conditioner with it whenever i showered didn’t massively hold off the fading. I started to notice over time that when the colour started to fade it was fading to a familiar blueish colour. After a few months of constantly topping up the purple dye i decided to have a change and allow my hair to go its own way, so i let the purple fade to blue and then used a combination of La Riche Directions Lagoon Blue, Atlantic Blue and Midnight Blue to gradient down from my darker roots that had clung to the purple pigment better, to light blue on the ends.

The blue was equally as beautiful in my hair, very shiny and it maintained the health of my hair very well as it was very conditioning; however it was equally as quick to fade. I noticed the blues were all fading to the sort of greenish colour that i had been stuck with after the sea incident all those years before.

During those months i moved to university and began experimenting with the colours available, mixing my own blue shades by combining different half empty pots of Directions and trying slightly darker blues in the range such as Neon Blue, which came out a beautiful deep indigo on my hair!

If i could have continued doing what i was doing forever then i would have been perfectly happy. The dyes, although fast fading, are cheap enough for it not to matter and they weren’t damaging my hair as far as i could tell. However Christmas arrived and i was going on holiday to see my dad who is currently living in South Africa and already knowing the dangers of sea water on La Riche Directions dyes, and knowing how much quicker dyes fade in the sun; i decided not to risk it and began fading out my hair dye.

As expected this took quite some time as i had been dying my hair for many months at this point. To begin with it was just how blonde my rootage was that was so noticeable, but as the weeks went by i was noticing my hair was turning more and more green rather than fading to my natural colour. Again i began using natural methods to fade the colour in my hair (baking soda, vitamin C, etc) but the green wasn’t fading at all. Getting a little desperate as my holiday drew closer i decided to try ColourB4…which deserves a whole post of its own so i wont go into detail about that experience now, but the end result was incredibly blonde rootage but the rest of my hair was still bright green! I was devastated, it was a colour i hated! With my skin tone i looked washed out and ill and it just looked horrible!

I booked a consultation with my hairdresser with the plan of having my hair stripped or bleached of the green but during the consultation my hairdresser explained to me that because i had put the dye straight onto my natural hair, the more times i topped it up, the further into my hair follicle the dye had been pushed and it had now left this green on my hair as a stain. If i had of bleached my hair, the green would have only become brighter. My amazing hairdresser contacted other hairdressers globally for recommendations and as lovely as they all were no one really knew how to get my hair back to blonde in time for my holiday! The only option i had left was to put a red dye over my hair to neutralize the green tones and essentially keep applying the red until the green underneath has all grown out of my hair.

So a warning to all those thinking about using La Riche Directions, i loved this product and i would highly recommend this dye on pre-treated hair, but if you are thinking of putting it on top of your natural hair colour please talk to your hair dresser first or at least do a test first, just dye a streak of your hair and see what phases it goes through over time first! If i had of known that i would end up with a green stain all over my hair that i have not been able to get rid of i would have done things much differently! I would probably have still used this dye, but i would have looked into how to pre-treat my hair first to ensure that i didn’t end up staining my hair colour.

Lucky for me I’ve grown to love my red hair, but even today when my colour starts to fade, the green is still visible underneath my hair dye! Please think carefully before using crazy colours and seek professional advise before beginning your coloured hair adventure, i know now from talking to many hairdressers that many other people have had the same problem as me and have been left with a green stain over their natural colour!