Dying Black Hair ---> Brown

rihanna09

Hi
Wanting to ask some advice, for a friend of mine. She's got naturally dark black hair, which I've always thought looked really lustrous on her. Anyway, she's decided to go for a change, not a huge one but she does want to change her black hair to brown. Not too sure it may be obvious but I'm pretty certain that just using an average shop bought dye isn't going to give her the lighter brown she wants. In fact I doubt it'll work at all, because of her natural hair colour. She doesn't want a totally light brown more of a middling colour. How does she go about this? The hairdresser is an obvious option, but she's ideally looking for an inexpensive route, which doesn't involve bleaching, she'd heard the horror stories and seen the results of too much bleaching!
I really don't know how to advise her as my hair is naturally fair and I've mainly just shop bought when I've needed a change
Any advice Mse?

pulliptears

From dark to light will always involve bleach, there is no way around this. Inexpensive routes to bleaching more often than not lead to expensive visits to a hairdresser to correct the mistakes I'm afraid.

Fuzzy_Duck

She could try a pre-lightener. It's cheap and easy to do. It IS bleach but unless her hair has already been bleached a lot and is still damaged, she doesn't have much to worry about. She'd only need to apply it once as well as a dark orange will be light enough to get the colour she wants. Once it's been lightened, she can dye it brown. Make sure it's a lighter shade than required, as brown dye tends to come out darker than on the box.

The other possibility is using dye specifically for natural black hair, such as Japanese hair dye. There's a forum thread on it here which should help her decide if it would be an option:
http://www.soompi.com/forums/topic/63015-palty-hair-dye-411/