Although I’ve used ‘box’ colour for many years, I’d given my hair a break from home colour for quite a while… when I spotted the offer (2 for £10 when I ordered) while shopping with Avon I decided to give their Advanced Techniques Professional Hair Colour a try (normal price £6).
The product is very similar, almost identical, to many of the popular home hair colours, such as Clairol, Garnier, and L’Oreal to name a few. You receive the colour and toner which you mix together before application, plus an enriching conditioner and a pair of plastic gloves – the gloves were quite tight and I don’t have big hands!
Everything relating to the application was very straightforward – the mixed colour is a creamy consistency which didn’t drip and was easy to apply.
The colour rinsed out easily and cleanly with warm water, and I noticed it didn’t strip my hair to feeling straw-like, which some colours can do at this stage.
The conditioner was thick and creamy and left my hair soft – I have fine flyway hair, so I wasn’t expecting it to bring any control, but it did feel carde-for.
The colour sadly didn’t do great things for me. I have mid-blonde hair with some grey, the ends were still carrying some lighter colour from my last salon colour about six months ago – I chose 12.01 Ultra Light Ash Blonde from Avon’s colour selection. It has made me very strawberry blonde at my roots, dare I say a bit orange in some lights!! Over the ends the colour was better, but overall it looks as though the ash blonde really hasn’t taken well and instead has just bleached my hair without providing much colour.
As for grey coverage, I wasn’t expecting much given my experience of other colours – I find the greys more likely to blend in that be coloured blonde – but given the orange some of my greys are more obvious now, though they have a silvery platinum thing going on rather that a dull grey!
Although it’s not the colour I was after, I did find the product easy to use, and I have another shade (9.0 Light Blonde) that I’ll try after a few more washes to see if that’ll calm the orange!
Get the right shade for you and you’ll have a good value home colour, especially if you can pick them up on offers that Avon often run – but be quick, rumours are that Avon will be discontinuing the Hair Colour range.
