A lot of people wonder “How often can I dye my hair?” either when they are just starting to experiment with their outlook or when they start noticing some hair damage after a while. Hopefully, you’re among the former but it’s an important question either way – knowing not only how to take care of your hair but how frequently you can afford to subject it to invasive and potentially damaging treatments.
So, how often should you color your hair? It depends on several different factors but the short and slightly vague answer is – “Not too frequent if you don’t want to cause any damage.” We warned you it was vague. To shed some more light on it, let’s delve into the details.
How often can you color your hair?
The main 3 things to consider here are what type of dye we’re talking about, what type of color, and what’s the starting condition of your hair. Depending on these factors you can either dye your hair every other day or once per month. Here are the things to keep in mind:
1. What type of dye are you going to use?
There are several different types of dyes – permanent, demi-permanent, semi-permanent, and temporary dyes. Permanent and demi-permanent dyes use developers such as peroxide to penetrate the individual hair strands and color them permanently. This can be a bit damaging and tiring for your hair, especially if it’s not in a very good condition to begin with. So, with these types of hair dyes, you should leave at least a couple of weeks between dying procedures or you’ll wear and tear your hair too quickly. Fortunately, permanent and demi-permanent hair dyes are made to last much longer than that.
Semi-permanent and temporary hair dyes, on the other hand, only coat the surface of the hair without penetrating or damaging it. They last much less than permanent and demi-permanent dyes and get slowly washed away after each shower you take. Because they are more forgiving to our hair, however, they can be safely reapplied much sooner.
2. What was your hair’s starting color and did you need to use bleach?
Trying to dye one shade of blonde hair into another shade of blonde or another light color is easy, regardless of what type of dye you’re using – you won’t need to bleach your hair, you won’t need to apply too much dye, and so on. If you have pitch-black hair, however, and you want to dye it bright red or blonde, for example, you’re going to need a lot of bleach and a lot of strong dye which will be very damaging to your hair. Doing something like this should be done very rarely, very carefully, only on hair that’s in a perfect condition, and, ideally – by a professional.
3. Is your hair damaged?
If your hair is in a perfect condition – it’s properly nourished and hydrated, it’s basically “virgin hair”, i.e. it’s never been dyed before, and it’s healthy and shiny, you can afford to subject it to a lot of things quite frequently.
However, if your hair is already pretty dry and damaged, giving it several weeks of proper care and nourishment is a must before you attempt any bleaching or dying.
