hair care help!!!!!

[pisces_girl88]

Last month I spent ALOT on getting my hair coloured now recently I noticed the colour has faded and looks washed out. I have heard on here&from other people that some LUSH conditiones/shampoo bars can strip your hair colour. Anyway this is reallly buggin me out seeing as I spent alot on it so i need you guys to help me ou here and let me know which

Comments

[tennyo]

Frequent washings will strip hair color. Sun exposure and chlorine will do that as well, so remember to wear hats outside and mist your hair with spring water before swimming in the pool. Your best bet is to wash your hair less often, and use a shampoo that's made specifically for color-treated hair. Aveda, Redken, Paul Mitchell, John Frieda, Bumble and Bumble, for example, has a wide range of products for color-treated hair. And for drug store brands, there's L'Oreal, Revlon, and Clairol. You can search for reviews at Make Up Alley to get an idea of what other people think of their products.

The idea of using shampoos for color-treated hair is to make your hair color last until your next trip to the salon for touch-ups. If you don't want to use a color-treated shampoo, then use the most gentlest shampoo you can find. There are also "no-poo" methods like using a dry shampoo (baking soda, cornstarch, etc) that will absorb dirt and oils from your hair.

Since coloring your hair tends to dry it out, the key is to condition as much as possible. Soft and conditioned hair makes your hair shiny and bright, and will hold the color better than if your hair is dry, brittle, or damaged. Some women on the Long Hair Community (this is an excellent resource for hair!) have started using condition-only methods, where they just wash their hair with conditioner. Apparently this is a good method for curly-haired folks as well.

Lush conditioners are nice, but they use Cetearyl Alcohol & Sodium Laurel Sulfate in their conditioners. The combination of these two ingredients work as an emulsifier--that is, they bind all the ingredients in the conditioner together (since oil and water naturally don't mix). And Sodium Laurel Sulfate is foaming/cleansing agent, so it helps the conditioner wash out of your hair. But you may find it to strip your hair color more quickly. Hair conditioning treatments like H'Suan Wen Hua (and Arabian Bright to a lesser extent) contain a lot of oils, which are good for moisturizing your hair, but without the SLS, it is a bugger to wash out of your hair. To give you an idea, I applied grapeseed oil to my hair recently, and it is still looking a bit greasy despite washing it with Big three times already.

I'm rambling again... To sum it up, you may be okay with using Trichomania as a shampoo, since the coconut in it will help condition your hair. If your hair is colored red, Reincarnate and Arabian Bright may have enough henna infusion in it to keep the color from fading. H'Suan Wen Hua and I Love Juicy are combinations suggested to customers who want to wash color out, like if they didn't like the result of the henna. Hm, what else? According to the reviews on the website, people seem happy with Rehab, even those with color-treated hair. Maybe you could use a small amount of that once or twice a week to get rid of product buildup? You would only need a small amount of that and only need to wash once.

[ecwoodburn]

*nod* I'm a member of curly_girls, and that's exactly why I don't use Lush conditioners -- they all contain SLS. This strikes me as odd as I've yet to see a drugstore-brand conditioner with it, even the ones with oils.

Incidentally, the CG method recommends using lemon juice combined with a silicone-free conditioner (any of the Suave Naturals line are good for this) to rinse out oil-based deep treatments.