Hair color mess up?

My moms friend has highlighted my hair 3 times now, and yesterday she did it, but it looks different. I have drk brn hair with blonde and red highlights. I mainly want blonde with a tad of red, but the red is kinda bright. I like it but this time it turned out really red and kinda takes over the blonde. It is way bright. She said she will tone it own. What does that mean. How can I get it to look blonde again with less red?

Hair color mess up?

She may have mentioned/have in mind adding an ashy-colored "toner". Basically it's kind of a sheer (but permanent)layer of color to counteract the undesirable color. This sounds really scary, but stick with me: you know those little old ladies who have kinda blue-ish looking hair? That's because they used too much toner (trying to keep their white/grey hair from yellowing).

You want a happy medium somewhere between Marge-Simpson-Blue and Bart-Simpson-Yellow. Believe me, I've been both of those colors and every UNhappy color in between! :-D

Dark hair goes through many "brassy" shades of red %26amp; orange %26amp; gold before it bleaches out to "blonde". This is true of all darker hair, but especially problematic if you naturally tend to have golden tones to your hair. "Toning" the highlights won't make them any lighter really, just less red and more natural looking (hopefully).

Another option if your hair is in VERY GOOD CONDITION ONLY is to re-highlight the highlights. In other words, bleach out more color. It took me forever to understand this but a colorist that fixed my home hair color disasters a few times told me "You can't remove color with color". Meaning, I had removed SOME color from my hair (the normal brownish color), the color underneath the brown was reddish brown, the color under that was red, then orange, then bright yellow, then yellow, then blonde, then platinum blonde, then white.

So that's a really long explination to tell you that if your hair looks too "brassy", you have two options: 1. "tone" the hair by adding the opposite color (purpleish blue) to cancel out the reddish-orange colors, or 2. remove more color from the hair (bleach it some more). Option 2 is always more damaging than Option 1.

GOOD LUCK!

Hair color mess up?

The red in your hair will fade. Red color always fades. The red molecule in the color is bigger then the other colors and so it's harder for the hair to take, which means that it will fade quickly. So if the red is too red, wash it a few times and it will not be so bright.