Light ash brown hair with Liese Prettia High Bleach

This is going to be a post about how I achieved a light ash brown hair colour without bleach, using simple products you can buy at the shopping centre. I will also be reviewing Liese Prettia's new colour, "High Bleach" at the end of the post. I spent almost a year trying to figure out how to achieve this colour with one goal in mind: NO BLEACH. I greatly despise the idea of bleaching my hair as the damage will be almost irreversible, especially for long hair. It's pricey at the salon and extremely difficult to do at home alone. 

But the light ash brown colour I wanted to achieve 'required' bleach as it was a level 8-9 (as told by numerous salon stylists). It is difficult to lift colour without bleach. But I was determined to try. 

If a box of "Lightest Ash Blonde 10.1" that you can get from the supermarkets can lift virgin black hair to a golden brown, wouldn't it make sense that it could lift any hair colour?

But no.... I tried using light ash blonde colour tube mixed with 20 vol peroxide and it made my hair darker. Because apparently ash dyes will cause the hair to become darker due to its silver tones (this was told to me by salon stylists). With this in mind.... I thought about toners but didn't really understand what the product was. But turns out a toner can be anything as long as it corrects the colour. You can tone your hair with dye, with a toner with colour deposit. So I thought.... if ash dyes don't do anything for us asian hair.... then what can? Find outttt moreeeee in this post!

These are some photos of my hair before the dying process. Slightly orange but a fairly light brown.

I used Liese Prettia's High Bleach in my hair and left it in for 40 minutes with a cap, hoping that locking in the heat will help the colour to process better. It's called "High Bleach" but I don't think it has bleach in it at all :/ There is no bleach powder or bleach cream in the box. Afterwards, my hair did not turn out like the hair swatches at all, it was a horrid orangey colour (as expected). You may not be able to see in the above photo because it is wet.

This is where these three fabulous products come in. Pantene's Deep Fortifying Intensive Treatment, Schwarzkopf blonde toner and fudge's paint box. It took my almost a year to figure out how to create an ash colour on asian hair. As you can see, the paint box dye I chose is in Blue Hawaii, the lightest blue that they currently have in their line (available to us in stores anyway) and the blonde toner is purple. The reason why blonde toner is purple is because purple pigments counter/neutralise yellow tones.

This is a colour wheel. It applies to all aspects of art as well as all that primary, secondary, complimentary la-di-da stuff. But if you notice, the colour opposite yellow is purple, the colour opposite orange is blue and the colour opposite red is green. These are the colours that will cancel out/neutralise eachother in hair. That's why blonde toner is purple so it can get rid of yellow undertones. But what do we do with orange hair? Purple doesn't do much for orange hair, kind of gradually turns it into a more yellowy colour (learnt from experience :( ). In Australia, we don't have blue shampoo or things like that. The closest we'll ever get is purple shampoo/conditioner and some silver toners and what not. I've also looked EVERYWHERE and there are no permanent blue dyes. Since brown hair is not as porous as blonde hair, the colour won't be absorbed or as vibrant (eg. dying blonde hair pink will turn out a lot better than dying brown hair pink = pink won't turn up on the brown because it's too dark). With that said, blue dye could be used as a toner for orangey brown hair. I tried this method once with my darker brown hair but it still wasn't light enough to be noticeable. So this is why we need a slight lift, which I used Liese Prettia's High Bleach for. Since Orange itself has some yellow undertones, I used both the blue dye and blonde toner together, mixed with the intensive treatment conditioner with a ratio of 1:1:3. It's up to you how much this ratio is but if your hair is brown, it won't really matter because the colour won't show up unless you have bleached hair. This will only act as a colour neutraliser, not a colour deposit/dye.

I apply this all over my hair and leave it in for another 40 minutes. Make sure to apply this on towel dried hair. As if you had just shampoo'd and you're going to put conditioner in it. These are some photos of the result after I blow dried. Also under different lighting. It's not as ashy as I'd want it to be but it's definitely a major improvement from what I had before. It doesn't actually look that way but it's definitely a lot lighter than my previous hair colour and will take a little getting used to because some parts look green (the effect of ash). Some blonder bits of my hair completely absorbed the colour and have turned a funky blue. 

All in all. The Liese Prettia High Bleach did its job in lifting my hair colour. But honestly, do not trust that swatch because NO ONE will get that beautiful golden yellow. It will never happen. Ahahaha. As for smell... well it really really smelled. It stung my eyes. But that's okay we all make these sorts of considerations when dying our hair right? I'll give it 4/5 points overall.

If I hadn't put this blue treatment in my hair it would have been an absolutely horrible orange colour that should not ever see the light of day.

I hope this post was helpful to you, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments and I will definitely get back to you! :) This was all trial and error on my own hair and I can't guarantee that it will work for you but I'm fairly sure it will since the concept is the same. If you're unsure just let me know and I can talk you through it :)

Thank you for reading!