Selecting the right hair color for you – Basic Color Analysis

Step 1: Selecting the right product

One of the first things to consider when deciding to change your hair color is the kind of color to use. Most store bought color is made up of metallic dyes that either stain the hair or sits outside layes of your hair called the cuticle and cover your color. Professional color will open the cuticle and deposit oxidative dyes into the hair which react with your hair to truly change its color. The results of professional color are longer lasting and more natural looking.

Most professional color utilizes harsh and toxic chemicals to achieve this result. These chemicals have damaging effects on your hair and health. For example, ammonia will destroy a protein called tyrosine in your hair which regulates the production of melanin, your hair’s natural pigmentation. Once your hair’s tyrosine is destroyed, your hair’s ability to “hold” color, either natural of synthetic, is forever compromised. Further, many of the pigments and active chemicals in many professional hair color are associated with many different types of cancer. For these reasons, careful consideration of a more natural, organic, safer professional hair color product like Organic Color Systems should always be considered.

Step 2: Determining Your Skin Tone

If you are unsure if you have a warmer or cooler skin tone, try this simple test that takes less than five minutes. Pull your hair back off your face in a pony tail and than wash your face so that there is not moisturizer or make up on it. Wrap a white towel around your neck and shoulders. To reveal your skin’s undertones, look into a mirror near natural light. If your face appears yellow next to the white towel you have a warm skin tone and if it looks more blue then you have a cool skin tone.

This test will allow you to determine if your skin tone is cool, neutral, or warm.

Step 3: Determining your natural and target level

Step 4: Matching your hair color to your personality

After determining your skin tone and natural level, you have also determined a range of optional shades to select from. You should stay within your skin tone (warm, neutral, or cool) and within two levels of your base level. Using this range, select the shade that you like best from the color shade chart.

It’s important to match your new hair color to the personality you want to have and not necessarily the one you currently have. Sometimes, a new hair color can be the perfect fix for “the slumps” as experts say it can have a profound impact on your mood and attitude. In fact, specialists have proven that hair color influences blood pressure and adrenalin levels which each have a great role in our emotional states and feelings.

So, if you dye your hair red, will you become a hot headed redhead? Specialists say you will, because everyday when you’re looking at yourself in the mirror your psyche gets signs that can influence your behavior and you’ll not only look like a redhead, but also act like one after a while and tend to adopt the stereotype.

Here are some examples of the perceptions people have of those with different hair colors:

The Science of Hair Color

Hair Color Pigments

There are two types of melanin that impact hair color which are pheomelanin and eumelanin:

Because Pheomelanin is slightly more chemically stable than black eumelanin it breaks down more slowly when oxidized. Therefore bleach gives darker hair a reddish tinge when artificially colored. The pheomelanin will break down slower than the eumelanin causing the hair to gradually become orange, then yellow, and finally white.

Hair Color Genetics

The balance of pheomelanin and eumelanin present in your hair is controlled largely by genetics.  The amounts of each pigment is determined independently.

The amount of eumelanin in the hair is determined by the polygenic method. Four different gene pairs determine how eumelanin the hair has and is determined by four genes from each parent.

That’s eight eumelanin genes altogether which, through the incomplete dominance method, will add up to a value between 0 and 8, for nine possible shades of brown. If you have 0, your hair is of the lightest blond color possible. If you have 8, your hair is the darkest brown, i.e., “black”. Statistically, again, the middle values are more likely than the extremes of 0 and 8.

So, all things being equal, medium brown should be the most common hair color. Of course, it isn’t, because all things are not equal. Due to various conditions in different parts of the world, dark-haired people survived around the equator better than their light-haired counterparts. On the other hand, of the people living way up North, the light-haired variety survived better than their dark-hair counterparts.

Pheomelanin is not polygenic, but it does use incomplete dominance. Therefore there is only one gene pair responsible for red hair, and it can add up to between 0 and 2 with 0 being having little to no red and 2 having a great deal of red.

Although statistically speaking 75% of people have at least some red in their hair, the eumelanin and the pheomelanin visually combine to present the different natural shades of hair color just as the primary colors of blue, green, and red combine to create natural colors.