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My stylist mentor told me to skip toner on porous hair and I paid for it
So my mentor Jenna at the salon in Austin told me last month that if hair is already super porous from lightening, you can skip the toner and just use a purple shampoo instead. I had a client with level 9 hair that was pretty damaged and I thought okay Jenna knows her stuff. I followed her advice and the color came out this weird brassy greenish mess that looked terrible under the salon lights. I had to redo the whole thing from scratch and it took an extra 90 minutes plus I had to comp her service. Now I always use toner even if the hair is fried because it locks in the tone way better than any shampoo can. Has anyone else gotten bad advice from a more experienced stylist that backfired hard?
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joel_butler22d ago
You said Jenna told you to skip the toner on porous hair. Thats the part that sticks out to me. Porous hair is basically a giant sponge with the cuticles wide open, so skipping the toner leaves those gaps unfilled and the underlying yellow tones can grab onto anything. A purple shampoo is just a surface maintenance tool, not a substitute for sealing the cuticle with toner. The real issue here is that a lot of mentors push shortcuts to save time or product cost, but toner does way more than adjust shade. It deposits missing pigment and helps fill in that damaged structure so the color actually sticks right.
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abbyg6022d ago
@joel_butler nailed it. Porous hair is like a sponge that's been left out in the rain, toner is basically the cap that keeps the color from running wild. My own hair looked like a swamp creature after I tried that trick once.
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