Do you want to lighten your bleached hair?
Hold on, don’t do it yet.
- Before bleaching your hair again, you should be absolutely sure that your hair can stand a second bleaching.
- Once you’re sure that your hair can put up with a new bleaching treatment, it’s important that you keep in mind the tone you’re starting from and the tone you’re hoping to get to.
- Because if you want to lighten your hair by more than three shades, you’ll have to do many bleaching sessions. And your hair health could be put at risk.
Personally, I love social media. Many of my clients share their posts with me every time that I do a change in look for them in the salon.
However, social media has a dark side, just like the moon. And this is that many people believe that these sudden changes in hair color are done almost as if by magic without having to pay any type of price.
Believe me, bleaching always has a price. You should know what you’re up against.
So the same thing doesn’t happen to you as what happened to Noelia, a young girl with more hair than head, as my mother would say.
Noelia came to see me with her hair absolutely destroyed. And I’m not exaggerating. When I say destroyed, I mean that I was even afraid to touch it. Because literally, it was disintegrating in my hands.
What had happened to Noelia’s hair?
She had done a bleaching treatment on her dark brown hair, as recommended by her favorite Youtubers.
I can’t comprehend how people could believe that a three-minute video could sum up years of learning about hair coloring.
When she finished bleaching her hair, she still wanted it to be lighter.
Because in this moment nothing had happened to her hair, as in, it hadn’t fallen out or wasn’t showing any signs of damage, she did a second bleaching treatment.
But this time, things didn’t turn out so well. Her hair couldn’t resist the effects of the bleach mix, and her hair strands, before healthy, were now frizzy, devoid of shine, movement, and life.
I’m guessing that in this moment Noelia could see flashes of all those before-and-after images of smiling girls in the Youtube videos, with their lightened hair, again and again. And I’m sure, that the question resounded in her head: why me?
The answer is simple: her hair was not in the right state to put up with a second bleaching treatment to lighten it.
What could I do for Noelia?
That, I’ll tell you in a bit, but first, if you want to lighten your bleached hair, take a few minutes, breathe deeply, and read what I’ve got to say next.
- How to check your hair health before bleaching it
- How to lighten bleached hair keeping in mind your base tone
- How to prepare bleached hair for lightening
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How to check your hair health before bleaching it
Before appying another bleaching treatment, you should always be sure that your hair can survive the chemical process, and for that, you’ll need to be able to assess your hair health. And this is what Noelia failed to do.
You shouldn’t simply breathe a sigh of relief because your hair didn’t fall out after the first bleaching treatment. No, you have to go further than that.
You need to carefully observe your hair.
- Do you notice that it’s drier?
- When you touch it is it as if you were coming into contact with broom bristles?
- Does it look dull, dry and without shine?
If so, your hair is speaking to you, and it’s saying that you shouldn’t bleach it again, at least not for now.
First, you need to hydrate and repair your hair so that when you bleach it again you won’t burn or break it.
Because, I can never get tired of saying it, bleaching is a chemical process, which breaks your hair cuticles so that the hair expulses its pigment. For that reason, after doing a treatment, your hair can look dull and dry and have split ends.
If your hair is like that, don’t bleach it, because it won’t be able to stand the treatment again. If you lighten it with another bleaching treatment, it’s more than likely that your hair will be burned, or even that it will break and fall out.
You need to hydrate it so that it can regain its strength after the last bleaching treatment, and you can do it by applying repairing oils, hydrating creams and heat masks. At the end of this article, I’ll give you a complete guide so that you know how to regain your hair health in little time.
As we saw, hair health is the first thing you should have in mind before doing another bleaching treatment, and after applying it as well. What’s the second thing?
The tone that you have after the first bleaching and the tone you’re hoping to have after the second. And that, I’ll talk about next.
How to lighten hair keeping in mind the base tone
Once your hair is in good state for the bleaching treatment, that’s to say, shiny and without split ends, you can decide what color you’re hoping to achieve.
This is very important, given that your base color will determine if you need to do more or less bleaching sessions. It’s not the same to achieve a silver blonde starting from a light blonde as it is starting from a dark brown.
The darker the base color is and the lighter the tone you wish to have is, the more bleaching sessions you’ll need.
The base tone is fundamental for knowing how many bleaching treatments you’ll need to get your desired shade.
- For example, if your base tone is a brown 4, and you want to have a light brown 6, you’ll only need one bleaching session.
- If your base tone is a medium blonde 7, and you want to have an extra light blonde 9, you’ll only need one bleaching session.
- But if your base tone is a chocolate 5, and you want to have blonde 8, you’ll have to do two bleaching sessions, and if your base tone is a dark brown 3, and you want to get to a blonde 8 shade, you’ll need to do three bleaching sessions.
As you can see, the more shades by which you want to lighten, the more bleaching you’ll need to do.
If you only want to lighten by two tones, one bleaching session should be enough; if you want to lighten by 3 tones, you’ll need two bleaching sessions, and if you’re looking to lighten by 4 or more tones, then you’ll need to bleach your hair three or four times.
How often can you do bleaching treatments?
The ideal time between bleaching treatments is one month, because in this way, you’ll give your hair time to recover.
Or you can be like Noelia, and take the risk of irreversibly ruining your hair.
Are you willing to wait 4 weeks before lightening your bleached hair?
If so, this is what you should do.
How to prepare bleached hair for lightening
If you want to have a lighter shade in your hair, you should never apply several bleaching treatments in the same day. Also not the day after, or even in the same week.
Because this would irreversibly damage your hair, to the point of breaking its fibers.
Lightening your hair is a slow process. Between each session of bleaching, you should wait at least four weeks, I repeat, FOUR WEEKS, and you should hydrate your hair while you’re waiting for your next bleaching treatment.
If you’re thinking about lightening your bleached hair, fifteen days before, you should do the following:
- Hydrate it with argan or coconut oil every day, applying some drops to the long part of your hair and the ends.
- Apply keratine masks with heat over your whole hair surface, at least once per week. To produce heat, you should use an aluminum cap.
- Four hours before the bleaching, put in coconut oil and don’t rinse it out, given that it won’t intefer with the bleach mix, and your hair will be more protected.
Conclusions
If you respect the time between each bleaching session, you can lighten your hair without paying too high of a price, like the one Noelia paid.
Unfortunately, the only thing I could do for Noelia was to cut her hair. A pixie cut, because her hair was already too burned, and I had to get rid of these sections that were weakening her hair even more.
It’s not that you can’t bleach your hair again, but you need to assess your hair health and respect the time between bleaching.
And now tell me, how is your hair health? Do you think that you can bleach it again?
