Calico Cali Designs: Product Reviews

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Product Review - Color Oops
11/9/11

Monday night did not go as planned. DH helped me dye my hair. But the color looked nothing like it did on the box. I freaked out. I looked like an angry teenage girl with Gothic red hair. DH was amazing and ran to the store and bought a box of dark brown dye. I stayed home, officially in hiding.

We thought the brown would mask the red. Nope. I ended up with dark hair that was still too cherry red. Add in my pale skin, super blonde almost non-existent eyebrows and lashes and it was not pretty. I hated it. I moped around at work all day on Tuesday. It was not pleasant. My friends were great...they gave me some good advice. They asked if it was permanent or semi-permanent dye. WHAT? There's a difference? Sh*% Sh*% Sh*%! Suddenly I felt like a failure as a girl. I never thought to read the box for that. I assumed all in home hair dye gradually washed out. #majorfail

My good friend @disfriendstitch wins the award for "best advice during a hair catastrophe". She recommended a product called Color Oops. After reading about one million online reviews, I decided to take her advice and try it. My biggest fear was damaging my hair, which at this point had been dyed twice in one day. I stopped at Walgreen's after work...and $12.99 later I was on my way home.

I bought the extra strength version because my hair was so very dark.

I knew from the reviews that I read that you had to follow the directions EXACTLY. Sooo..I let DH cut off a chunk of my hair and we did a test swatch.


Test clump of hair, soaking in the product.

After soaking and rinsing the test swatch looked good. Still nervous but determined not to spend another day with this cherry hair I forged on.


Post-test hair clump. The color looks fantastic now!!!

I took out my contacts just in case any product got on my face and DH put the Color Oops in my hair (you mix it in a bottle and squirt it on). I sat for 20 min with a shower cap on letting the product soak in. Both DH and I thought it smelled very citrus like. Almost like grapefruit. A little bit did drip on my face, but unlike the hair dye..it did not burn. Also my scalp did not burn or itch from the Color Oops. With about 5 min left DH started to get nervous because my hair looked orange through the shower cap. But I was determined to follow the directions exactly, so I left the product in for the full 20 minutes.

Next up...rinse off the product in the shower, then shampoo and rinse for 20 minutes. I didn't think this would be a problem...I like to take looong hot showers. But I have to admit only 7 minutes in I was bored. To me rinsing my hair was the worst part...it felt very snarly..as my mom would say it was a 'rat's nest'. My hair felt coarse and tangled and it was hard to move it around on my head.

Eventually the 20 min past...I shampooed and then rinsed again for 5 more minutes. The longer you rinse the better the results. Because I was worried about damaging my hair, after that last rinse I used a deep conditioning treatment that I also left on for 5 minutes. Yup that's a total of 30 minutes in the shower. It was for sure the longest shower I've ever taken. But totally worth it. I followed up with a leave-in conditioner before I blow dryed my hair.

The end result: fantastic hair!!! It looks 1000 times better. I'm soo very happy with the results. Because I had dyed my hair twice (both dyes were permanent) but only did the Color Oops once, it did not remove all of the color. I would have needed to repeat the process in order to return my hair back to it's natural color. But I like the color that I ended up with..and I was afraid to push my luck. My hair was not damaged in this process...but I didn't want to add even more chemicals to it. Besides..I had only bought the one box and we used it all up with the first application. If your hair is longer than shoulder length you might want to buy two boxes right away.

The directions did say that as the hair oxidizes the color will get darker. Sure enough when I woke up this morning the color was darker than it was last nite. But it's not orange. It's no longer cherry red. And I like it a lot.

So bottom line...I give this product an A+.