A great tip my stylist informed me of: Never try to go from an ash color to a golden color or vice versa, from a golden color to an ash color. The tones do not turn out right. Hair can turn green (yep, I did that) or just not take.

Maybe this is the case with your hair since you are normally an ash/beige blonde and tried to go golden brown. Try dying your hair with a brown that would fit in the ash/beige tone range instead of golden.

Also, never try to go from platinum to brown on a home kit. Platinum hair is very porous and can either take on too much color, or not take at all. It also spots and stripes easily. (yep, I did this too) Leave that to the professional as it will cost twice as much to corect it! Good luck!

Amen on the platinum to brown caution. After several months of dying my (very) dark brown hair platinum in college, I decided to dye it back so I looked a little less weird for a job. I bought a really pretty (on the box) shade of Feria that promised, as all Feria varieties do, 'multi-faceted, shimmering color.'

It was multi-faceted, and shimmering...purple. Deep, royal purple. I ended up running back to the store and frantically searching for the flattest, dullest shade of brown I could find (all the while enduring the not-so-subtle stares of my fellow Montana K-Mart shoppers, who seemed hellbent on telling me through nonverbal insistence that my hair was purple).

Jen--you might see if there's an Aveda school near you. The services are all much cheaper than a regular salon, and they do corrective coloring. Good luck!

In my experience L'Oreal makes really good home hair colour. I use Preference in the dark brown range and it is amazing. My hair really looks healthier after I colour it! And if you call the number on the box, they are really helpful about what you should do next. Maybe Garnier has a similar number?

I've had that panicky "omg---ORANGE?" feeling the next day as well...don't worry, it's fixable! The ash/golden/neutral thing is really important, apparently! You have gorgeous hair! Good luck with the colour correction. And by the way...I'm a Canadian reader and I LOVE Delush! Thanks so much and keep up the great work!

I'm actually pretty partial to the Garnier Nutrisse line, they have a new caramel brown that I'm very happy with.

As far as the blond to brown conversion, it's a "grabbing" problem. Bleaching your hair, especially in the long term, often makes your hair less able to absorb color (on the other hand, some "lucky" people, like Bria, as Maria noted, have an over-absorption problem.)

While home color works for subtle changes, I've found from personal (vermillion, anyone?) experience that for drastic changes, it's definitely worth the money to go to a pro colorist.

For many years my two sisters and my mother insisted that I would look much better as a strawberry blonde instead of with my usual espresso-colored hair. I wasn't partial to either, and when ganged up on in that manner, crumbled and allowed horrible things to be done to me. My sisters regularly purchased Frost n'Tip kits and bleached my whole head with it. They didn't do it on a regular basis either, so it wasn't unusual for me to have three inch roots. I started dyeing my hair with henna to cover it up. It worked okay...I used a brown henna kit and my hair took to it fairly well. Then disaster struck.
With Prom looming, my mother took me to a pro to get my hair colored, yep you guessed it - strawberry blonde. The stylist said she could make it work...and well, it looked good when she was done. But the next morning, my hair had a definite gray pallor - enough that I got several comments about it from classmates! Once again, I purchased the brown henna kit, and my hair actually came out a lovely reddish brown.
When the time came for me to redo the henna, I believe I accidentally purchased a red kit instead of a brown. Again, my hair looked okay when I was done. I left my house for an overnight babysitting job, and the next morning, the kid's mother was all like, "why is your hair pink?" I was HORRIFIED. I went home, found the dye my mother used to cover her gray, and dyed my hair with it. Thank god it covered everything! I haven't colored my hair since.

i use Feria always and my stylist just today told me i had great color and shine and she wanted to know what i used. wow! i have never had a bad color in this line, i stay in the coffee shades. good luck!
hey, im canadian too. love the site.
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Ok, I am a strait guy that just likes to experment with hair color. My cousin emailed this to me and insisted that I share my personal experience. Well, anywho i was going to dye my hair blonde (my hair is brown) and I used this Loreal hair kit thingy my cousin did it for me and it was fine...until i rinsed instead of blonde I was RED haired...no not carrot RED! So we called the company and we found out that their had been a bad batch released! Oh snap! And they just apologized and offered us a coupon.

I love using Feria. I have a close friend who's one of those pierced all over, tattooed all over and randomly colored hair people and its what she swears by. You always get really good color, coverage and your hair is always nice and shiny afterwards. I've got brown hair (never dyed it light though) and i've dyed it dark brown, black, back to dark brown, red.... its always turned out well.

You didn't do a strand test?! Oh dear oh dear. Well, you can't say you weren't warned! And I hope you've learnt your lesson, miss!

I take it you didn't do a sensitivity test either? I would always recommend that when using a different brand or colour, because my mum's been colouring her own hair for years and years, and about a year ago, she used I-can't-remember-which-brand, not her usual one, and her scalp went red and lumpy and extremely painful. There were lots of cool-water showers that week! And our GP prescribed something to ease the pain. But believe me, putting a product to which you are allergic over your entire scalp - that an error that nobody ever wants to make!

Having very vivid ginger hair, I don't have to dye mine as I really rather like it. I've had lots of mad cuts, as I used to model a few years ago for a local salon (which has gone on to become rather prestigious), but the only colour I've ever had is a few slices of ash blonde and a lot of tiny, tiny painstakingly done brunette strands. Oh, and one summer where I dyed my pixie cut black, which was very inadvisable as, of course, my roots looked ridiculous. I had to do the roots every ten days or so, and I was very poor at the time anyway, so I couldn't afford to either keep it up or to get it restored to ginger. Eventually, a very kind hairdresser friend talked her boss into using me for training purposes - teaching the trainees how to do a five-hour bleach bath without making the hair fall out! So I got it sorted in the end.

(And for what it's worth, I think a muted medium chestnutty colour would look nice on you.)

You can try to correct it by using a glaze. I just had my dyed red hair glazed with brown and it really knocked the red out of it and left it a nice honey color. If you don't want to go to salon expense, I think John Frieda just launched a line of glazes... hope it helps. :)