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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...
It's a fact universally acknowledged that blonde, dyed hair can be more susceptible to damage. That's why Aveda's purple toning shampoo doesn't just rid your precious highlights of unwanted yellow tones, it's also packed with botanical oils and a strengthening complex to revive your ends from top to bottom.
Touted as a brand for all hair types, styles and textures, Amika’s shampoo is a top brass buster. Formulated with ‘bond cure technology’ to target hydrogen bonds (notorious culprits for breakage) and luxurious plant butters — with mango butter extract providing a welcome summer scent — this formula’s nourishing and brass-busting claims are strong, and live up to the hype.
Harnessing the power of a clever technology which helps to restore broken hair bonds, this shampoo repairs damaged hair from within the hair shaft and helps neutralise any brassy tones. It's potent, though, we should add - use this once a week and dilute with another shampoo as it can be overpowering (read: you might be left behind with a purple tint if you're too overzealous with the product).
Bleach London Purple Reincarnation Shampoo
Gentle enough to use every day, this shampoo is powered by a bond restoring technology that helps gently cleanse and breathe fresh life into damaged ends. If your scalp veers on the sensitive side, this is the one for you.
Have your locks lost their luminosity? Is your blonde looking flat and lifeless? If you're nodding along, yes, it's time to turn your attention to this clever innovation from l'Oréal. Restoring parched ends and damaged hair, it helps boost shine and revive tired-looking tresses.
John Frieda Violet Crush for Blondes Toning Shampoo for Blonde Hair
Embracing our grey has never been easier, but where some are blessed with a natural silver-y tone, others may want to tone it up themselves. This Violet Crush shampoo neutralises unwanted yellow and restores tone to a balance of cool and bright, for blonde and silver hair.
Philip Kingsley Pure Blonde Booster Color-Correcting Purple Shampoo
Formulated for all hair — whether it’s fine, medium, coarse or anything in between — this Philip Kingsley shampoo boosts shine and waves goodbye to yellow hues with a nifty blend of violet micro-pigments and static-smoothing technology.
The subtle, natural result of this makes it a winner for those looking for a more authentic I-don't-dye-my-hair-this-colour look, rather than the icy white finish others crave. Think: Sienna Miller.
Kérastase Blond Absolu Anti-Brass Purple Shampoo
This range has made waves in the beauty industry, especially among blondes, and we can't deny its brightening effects, which help add brilliance and shine to previously lifeless ends.
Hyaluronic acid and Edelweiss flower create a deeply nourishing formulation that hydrates and prevents strands from further pollutant damage — city slickers, this one’s for you.
Moroccanoil, known primarily for its argan oil blend (the bestselling hair oil in the US, don't you know), has branched out. Happily for us, the brand offers a range of haircare heroes, and this purple shampoo is specially formulated for beating brassiness while bolstering the health and strength of your strands, in true Moroccanoil style.
If you can’t spend a day away from your styling tools — we know you’re attached to those straighteners — the ArganID found in Morrocanoil products can help repair strands from the inside out, too.
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