Colouring Your Clients Hair For Perfect Match Hair Extensions
No matter how many shades of hair extensions are available, sometimes a client's hair will not match flawlessly with any pre-coloured shades. This could be for many reasons, the most common being that your client has never coloured their hair, and their shade is virgin, which tends to be less vivid than pre-coloured hair extensions. Or your client has coloured their hair many times before, resulting in a colour with unusual undertones that clash against the very clear and vivid shades of hair extensions available. When this happens, to get an excellent result for your client, it is necessary to colour or tone the natural hair so that the canvas matches a hair extension's colour more accurately. When the hair extensions are fitted, you get a beautiful seamless blend.
Hair Extension Consultation
During a hair extension consultation, part of the process will be to colour match the hair. If you are not able to find the perfect match at this stage, you will need to discuss with your client that the hair will need to be coloured before the extensions are fitted and decide what colour this will be. The most efficient way is to look at your colour rings and find a tone closest to your client's hair but on the darker side. In our client's case, her hair was a very warm light brown/blonde where it had been previously coloured, and therefore a 30 on the colour chart was the closest darker shade to aim for.
Strand Test
To ensure you are achieving a colour your client is comfortable with, we recommend doing a strand test first. Take a small section of hair to colour, then check that the outcome matches a colour on the hair extensions colour ring, and check that your customer is pleased with the outcome. Once you have achieved a colour your client is happy with; you can colour your client's hair, ready for the hair extension fitting. Although in our tutorial, we have done the process in one sitting, we would recommend doing this over a couple of days so that the hair can be coloured and conditioned. Then it can be washed with a clarifying shampoo before the hair extensions are fitted to make sure the surface is nice and clean. In our client's case, we aimed for a colour 30 colour; however the strand test resulted in a slightly darker outcome; therefore, for our fitting, we used colour 6 and colour 30, sandwiched together for a perfect blend throughout the hair. The final result was a perfectly blended colour that matches flawlessly.