Should you wash your hair before coloring it and why would you care about whether your hair is freshly washed before a hair color appointment at all? If you have missed the debate over having your hair clean or dirty for the color service and right after it, you are at the right place to clear things up from the very beginning.

As a hair color specialist, I’ve seen both nightmares and success stories when it comes to color maintenance. Read on to know the ways you can get and keep those beautiful colors you’ve always wanted, straight from the source.

Is It Better to Dye Your Hair Dirty or Clean?

Back in the day, hairstylists would tell their clients that dirty hair was best when it came to hair coloring. Hair color was loaded with tons of ammonia, so it could break through any product buildup or natural oils.
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that is a big, fat LIE. Color companies use new technology in most of their products now. This means that hair color has become gentler on both the hair and scalp, and it may not break through the 3 days’ worth of dry shampoo stuck to your oily roots. Go to the salon with clean, washed hair, or you may be sacrificing gray coverage.

​Having dirty hair during your consultation with your stylist can be confusing for them, as your strands can appear darker than usual. This can further lead to incorrect formulation to get you to your inspiration photo. This means that you are in jeopardy of getting a shade you didn’t ask for.

Prevent these hair nightmares by using a gentle clarifying shampoo followed by a light conditioner the day of (or the night before) your salon appointment. I like Redken’s Detox Hair Cleansing Cream and Redken’s Extreme Conditioner.

Should I Wash My Hair Before Bleaching It?

For those of you that get bright highlights or a blended balayage, dirty hair could mean an inconsistent end result. The oil within your scalp can block the lightener from lifting the hair, and hair that doesn’t lift properly can turn splotchy or orangey (us hairstylists call this “blorange”).

For those of you that get your roots bleached using an on-scalp lightener, you may want to avoid coming with freshly washed hair. Instead, wash your hair at least 24 hours prior to bleaching it. Remember that fun fact about ammonia breaking through hair color? On-scalp lightener is typically full of ammonia. You want your natural oils to protect your scalp so the bleach doesn’t eat away at it, especially if you have a sensitive scalp prone to irritation.

Rather than using a clarifying shampoo the day prior to coloring hair using bleach, I recommend something moisturizing, like Verb’s Hydrating shampoo and conditioner.

Can You Dye Your Hair Wet?

Water can create a barrier on the hair, complicating the color process. Many times, the color will still work, but it can be unpredictable. For this reason, I blow dry my clients prior to coloring when they come in with wet hair for the color service.

Some color companies have created toners and glosses that can go on wet hair, but this is the only exception in my book. If you are dyeing your hair at home, do start with dry clean hair.

Can I Wash My Hair After Dyeing It?

Short answer? NO.

The way that most hair color works is by penetrating the outermost layer of the hair, known as the cuticle, and pushing dye molecules in to react with the pigment in each strand. It takes 72 hours for the cuticle to close completely. Washing your hair prior to that means that color molecules are going to escape your strands and color will fade quickly.

I speak on behalf of all hairdressers when I say this: PLEASE, skip a few regular wash days and wait the three days for long-lasting color.

Tips on Washing Color-Treated Hair

Now that it’s been three days and you’re allowed to wash your hair, I’ll let you in on some of the best ways to maintain it.

1. First things first, use whatever shampoo your colorist recommends. They know your hair best. Their hands are in it. A drugstore shampoo can create buildup, cause hair loss, and cause chemical reactions during the color appointment. I personally recommend color-safe lines, like Redken, Living Proof, or R+Co. Every shampoo by any of those companies is safe for color-treated hair. Most of these have UV protection technology in it to help protect your color from the sun. This is major!
2. Wash one to three times a week in lukewarm water. Hot water will open the cuticle of the hair and help your color pour out of it! As a result, you might need to schedule a new color service sooner than expected.
3. If you are a brunette going blonde, you might consider using a blue shampoo to remove orange tones. For a blonde that is trying to stay bright, I recommend a purple shampoo or a violet-toned mask. Do not use either of these products more than once a week: over-toning your hair can complicate the coloring process in the future. Overusing these toning shampoos can also cause dryness in the ends of the hair.

 
I will add a bonus hot tip here: consider purchasing a shower head filter to remove hard water and other impurities from your water. Your water can be causing dry scalp, brassiness, and brittle hair.

A new study shows that the price for a basic salon haircut varies widely from country to country, and in some countries there's a huge gap in price between men's cuts and women's cuts. The United States came in at an average of $95 for a woman's haircut and $44 for a men's haircut.* Just north in Canada, the price drops to $34 for women and $24 for men, and across the pond in England it's $57 for women and $28 for men.

* Keep in mind that, because the data was gathered at each country's capital, the US average reflects prices in Washington, DC, not the national average. ​

Everyone in the world faced the same tough question during endless months of coronavirus lockdown: grow your hair or let your mom cut it?

But now, hairdressers are re-opening, and so are bars, theatres and wedding venues. The Salon de Mom literally won’t cut it anymore. It’s time to get a proper haircut.

The problem is that money is tight right now for most of us. And a proper haircut tends to be a payday treat. Can you afford to give a little dignity back to your ‘Barnet’?
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It depends where you live. NetCredit researched the price of women’s and men’s haircuts in every country around the world, and we found that the disparity between countries and genders is massive. Read on to find the places where getting a haircut is a snip.

​Argentina is Home to the World’s Cheapest Haircuts
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​Scandinavians are famed for their golden locks, and the price of a haircut in this northern European region also glitters. Averaged across genders, four of the top ten most expensive haircuts are in Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland). Other big economic powers also feature, including the UK.

At the cheap end of the scale, you’ll find a cut-rate cut in South America, Africa, parts of Asia, and eastern Europe. Argentina is the cheapest overall. Nigeria is sixth-cheapest overall, but it would be different if it weren’t for the 634% disparity between women’s and men’s cuts: a trim costs $13.43 for a Nigerian woman but just $1.83 for a man.

A Man’s Haircut in Norway is the World’s Most Expensive

Think Vikings had messy, unkempt hair? Wrong. The steep price of a man’s haircut in Scandinavian countries today reflects a long tradition of Scandi men taking their grooming seriously. A man’s cut in Norway costs $64.50 today, the most expensive men’s cut in the world. Norway also has the narrowest price gap between genders out of the top 20 men’s cuts: a woman’s cut costs ‘just’ 20% more, at $77.72.

We found nine countries where the five-buck cut (or less) is still the norm for men. The cheapest three are African countries (Zambia, Mozambique, and Nigeria). In Taiwan, a man’s cut costs $2.23 more than a woman’s – but it might just save your life. At the height of the pandemic, one Taiwanese mom paid for a “do not dare to go outside” hairdo for her 15yo son: a haircut so bad that he wouldn’t dare leave the house to see his friends.

The World’s Cheapest Women’s Haircut is in Bosnia – and it’s Cheaper than Men’s
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A different Scandi country tops the table for expensive women’s haircuts: Denmark is the only country in the world where a haircut costs more than $100. However, the US and UK aren’t far behind, at $95.00 and $94.71 respectively. The Danish Board of Equal Treatment ordered individual salons to reduce the gender price disparity in 2013, but courts later ruled that it was okay to have different prices. Today, the average women’s cut in Denmark costs 112% more than the men’s.

All in, Bosnia and Herzegovina may be the fairest place for a woman to get a haircut. Bosnia has the cheapest women’s haircut in the world ($6.20) and a disparity of just 8% – a man’s haircut costs around 47¢ more. Sarajevo, where we took our data, is lined with hairdressers, and the competition keeps prices down. But grooming remains a point of pride for citizens, who even maintained standards during the longest military siege in modern history – to the extent of holding a “Miss Besieged Sarajevo” contest.

Why (and Where) Does a Woman’s Haircut Cost More?

Men pay more for a cut in just 11 of the 102 countries with available data. The biggest gaps are in Africa and parts of Latin America, although Paraguay has the second-lowest disparity. Fairest of all is the microstate of Andorra in southwestern Europe. Andorran men pay more than women, as is the case in eight of the ten fairest countries.

But why does a man’s cut usually cost less? “[I]t doesn’t take as long to cut their hair, but also they’re in the salon more regularly,” explains celebrity hairdresser Adam Reed. “And there’s less time taken and fewer products used on the finish – for a man it’s four to five minutes, whereas women’s blow-dries can take a long time.”
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Still, others are aiming for parity: “We allow exactly the same amount of time for an appointment whether it’s for a man or a woman,” says Covent Garden hairdresser Neil Moodie. “It has been a slow process, trying to convince men that they should pay the same as women, but this was mainly due to the cheapness of going to a barber back in the day versus going to a women’s hairdressing salon.”

Our prices are averaged, so it’s always possible to find a cheaper cut in your area. If you’re time-rich and money-poor, you can always snag yourself a cheap training session with an apprentice hairdresser. And if you can’t afford to make it back to the salon, why not take inspiration from these unlikely quarantine self-haircut wins?

METHODOLOGY & SOURCES

​We sourced the price of a basic haircut (no beard trim or wash) for both genders in 102 capital cities. If prices were not advertised on the internet, our research team emailed and called businesses for a quote.

Legend has it that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned gray overnight just before her beheading in 1791.

Though the legend is inaccurate—hair that has already grown out of the follicle does not change color—a new study from researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons is the first to offer quantitative evidence linking psychological stress to graying hair in people.
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And while it may seem intuitive that stress can accelerate graying, the researchers were surprised to discover that hair color can be restored when stress is eliminated, a finding that contrasts with a recent study in mice that suggested that stressed-induced gray hairs are permanent.

The study, published June 22 in eLife, has broader significance than confirming age-old speculation about the effects of stress on hair color, says the study’s senior author Martin Picard, PhD(link is external and opens in a new window), associate professor of behavioral medicine (in psychiatry and neurology) at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. 

“Understanding the mechanisms that allow ‘old’ gray hairs to return to their ‘young’ pigmented states could yield new clues about the malleability of human aging in general and how it is influenced by stress,” Picard says.

“Our data add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that human aging is not a linear, fixed biological process but may, at least in part, be halted or even temporarily reversed.”

Studying hair as an avenue to investigate aging“

Just as the rings in a tree trunk hold information about past decades in the life of a tree, our hair contains information about our biological history,” Picard says. “When hairs are still under the skin as follicles, they are subject to the influence of stress hormones and other things happening in our mind and body. Once hairs grow out of the scalp, they harden and permanently crystallize these exposures into a stable form.”

Though people have long believed that psychological stress can accelerate gray hair, scientists have debated the connection due to the lack of sensitive methods that can precisely correlate times of stress with hair pigmentation at a single-follicle level.

Splitting hairs to document hair pigmentation

​Ayelet Rosenberg, first author on the study and a student in Picard’s laboratory, developed a new method for capturing highly detailed images of tiny slices of human hairs to quantify the extent of pigment loss (graying) in each of those slices. Each slice, about 1/20th of a millimeter wide, represents about an hour of hair growth.

“If you use your eyes to look at a hair, it will seem like it’s the same color throughout unless there is a major transition,” Picard says. “Under a high-resolution scanner, you see small, subtle variations in color, and that’s what we’re measuring.”

The researchers analyzed individual hairs from 14 volunteers. The results were compared with each volunteer’s stress diary, in which individuals were asked to review their calendars and rate each week’s level of stress.

The investigators immediately noticed that some gray hairs naturally regain their original color, which had never been quantitatively documented, Picard says.

When hairs were aligned with stress diaries by Shannon Rausser, second author on the paper and a student in Picard’s laboratory, striking associations between stress and hair graying were revealed and, in some cases, a reversal of graying with the lifting of stress.

“There was one individual who went on vacation, and five hairs on that person’s head reverted back to dark during the vacation, synchronized in time,” Picard says.

Blame the mind-mitochondria connection

To better understand how stress causes gray hair, the researchers also measured levels of thousands of proteins in the hairs and how protein levels changed over the length of each hair.

Changes in 300 proteins occurred when hair color changed, and the researchers developed a mathematical model that suggests stress-induced changes in mitochondria may explain how stress turns hair gray.

“We often hear that the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, but that’s not the only role they play,” Picard says. “Mitochondria are actually like little antennas inside the cell that respond to a number of different signals, including psychological stress.”

The mitochondria connection between stress and hair color differs from that discovered in a recent study of mice, which found that stress-induced graying was caused by an irreversible loss of stem cells in the hair follicle.

“Our data show that graying is reversible in people, which implicates a different mechanism,”  says co-author Ralf Paus, PhD, professor of dermatology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “Mice have very different hair follicle biology, and this may be an instance where findings in mice don’t translate well to people.”

Hair re-pigmentation only possible for some

Reducing stress in your life is a good goal, but it won’t necessarily turn your hair to a normal color.

“Based on our mathematical modeling, we think hair needs to reach a threshold before it turns gray,” Picard says. “In middle age, when the hair is near that threshold because of biological age and other factors, stress will push it over the threshold and it transitions to gray.

“But we don’t think that reducing stress in a 70-year-old who’s been gray for years will darken their hair or increasing stress in a 10-year-old will be enough to tip their hair over the gray threshold.”

More information
The study is titled “Quantitative Mapping of Human Hair Greying and Reversal in Relation to Life Stress(link is external and opens in a new window).”
All contributors (all from Columbia unless noted): Ayelet Rosenberg, Shannon Rausser, Junting Ren, Eugene V. Mosharov, Gabriel Sturm, R. Todd Ogden, Purvi Patel, Rajesh Kumar Soni, Clay Lacefield (New York State Psychiatric Institute), Desmond J. Tobin (University College Dublin), Ralf Paus (University of Miami, University of Manchester, UK, and Monasterium Laboratory, Münster, Germany), and Martin Picard.
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The research was funded by grants from the Wharton Fund and the National Institutes of Health (grants GM119793, MH119336, and AG066828).
The authors declare no competing interests.