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ELLE Edit: The Best Purple Shampoos For Maintaining Your Blonde
The best in class for banishing the brass.
It's a tale as old time. Those former sun-kissed highlights losing their perfect vanilla blonde hue mere weeks after you spent what felt like an eternity at the hairdressers, and leaving you with unwanted brassy tones and haphazard balayage.
It's less than ideal, really. Which is where an anti-brass - or purple - shampoo comes in. As Harriet Muldoon, award-winning colourist at Larry King Hair, tells us, a purple shampoo is a sure-fire way to boost shine, maintain your shade and even prolong visits to the hair salon.
Because while icy blonde shades, honey hues and golden tones have careened across our screens since fashion immemorial and provided us with endless inspiration, maintaining such colour is always the hardest part.
What is purple shampoo?
As you likely learnt in any school art class, purple is opposite yellow on the colour wheel. Simply put, this means the purple pigments in anti-brass shampoos neutralise yellow tones by balancing them out, in the same way you’d wear green pigmented colour corrector on red or rosy skin.
How does purple shampoo work?
Purple shampoos (mainly for blondes) and anti-brass formulations (for anyone with warm-toned tresses) are highly pigmented to temporarily alter the colour of your hair, dispensing blue and violet particles onto its surface.
If you don’t want to use purple shampoo because your hair is already cool-toned, Harriet suggests the High Bright Shampoo range from Redken, which uses vitamin C to target dull or dark strands (in the same way it does for your skin) instead of colour pigments.
How often should I use purple shampoo?
Harriet advises using it every other time you wash your hair. ‘If you’re washing twice a week, then swap your regular shampoo out for a purple option once a week,’ she explains. ‘Use it too often and the pigment can make hair seem darker, especially if you’re using anti-brass shampoo on hair that’s already cool toned.
‘I always say it’s a visual thing so only use it when you start to feel a little brassy. Only target the areas you feel need it and I always dilute with my Larry King A Social Life shampoo to prevent overtone.’
How do I keep bleached hair healthy?
Brassiness can be caused by sun exposure, hard water and heat styling tools. If you want to combat it, you likely need to be protecting and rejuvenating your hair too. For this, Harriet suggests reaching for a bond-building treatment.
‘Your bonds may have been compromised during the colouring process,’ she says. ‘Or it could be due to over-use of heat and general wear and tear, even if you’ve never dyed your hair.
‘As well as using soft, snag-free hair accessories rather than tatty elastics, you'll need a formulation that’s going to protect your bonds and strengthen them, injecting some keratin and vital proteins back into the strands to keep them shiny and healthy.’
Luckily for you, there are myriad bond-building treatments on the market. So, once you’ve achieved your perfect tone, you can work on fortifying your strands and keeping them silky, smooth and healthy, too.
As for the best purple shampoos to shop? Keep scrolling...
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