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Spent 6 hours trying to figure out why a balayage turned brassy and it was one dumb thing
Had a client last month who wanted to go from a level 4 to a level 8 ash blonde, and the mids kept pulling orange no matter what I did. I rebleached twice, tried a toner, even blamed the water at my salon in Sacramento, and after 6 hours of panicking I realized my lightener was mixed too thick and wasn't saturating evenly. Now I'm torn on whether this means I should always mix thinner than the instructions say or if I just got sloppy that day. Do you all follow the manufacturer ratio exactly or do you eyeball it based on the hair, because I keep going back and forth on this.
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sarah_mason1mo ago
Level 4 to 8 is a huge jump and the mids are always the last to let go, so you were fighting two battles at once. Mixing too thick is a sneaky one because it looks fine in the bowl, but it stops moving once it hits the hair and you get hot spots. I usually mix a touch looser than the label on big lifts, more like a thick pancake batter, and do smaller sections so I can actually feel it saturate. The label ratio is a good starting point but it assumes perfect hair and a fresh tube, and real heads of hair are not that. If your test strand was even, I would not change your whole mixing habit over one rough day.
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