What Happens If You Use Blonde Shampoo On Brown Hair

If you know what shampoo is used for and why shampoo is the way it is, they are fantastic products. 

If you’re not into this it can just be tricky! When do you use which shampoo? For example, can you use shampoo for blonde hair if you have brown hair yourself?

I was talking about this the other day with a couple of girlfriends. It turned out that some of them knew very well what to use and why and some of them didn’t know. It made for a beautiful evening because many of us had learned something!

What I found most interesting was the question Alicia asked. She sat next to me and asked and the one who knew more about it: “What happens when you use blonde shampoo on brown hair? The one who knew more about it looked up and owed the answer!

That caused some hilarity because all evening she could answer everything with an “I know everything look”.

But, of course, we immediately went to investigate! For an outsider, it probably wouldn’t have looked pleasant. 5 girls together who were all searching for answers on their phones.

These evenings, as you probably know, I like to use for articles like this one! That’s why I’m now going to give you all the information we found. Then you don’t have to search anymore and soon you will know more than you think.

So, what happens if you use blonde shampoo on brown hair?  If you’re talking about blonde shampoo with purple pigments, not much is going to happen. Even though the shampoo is made especially for blondes, not much happens. This is because when you shampoo purple pigments on dark hair, your hair is darker than the pigment. Normally the shampoo doesn’t contain any ingredients that lift the color, so little or nothing is going to happen here.

What happens if you use a shampoo for blonde on dark hair?

The answer above is mainly based on the shampoo made by John Frieda. It doesn’t contain any aggressive ingredients that would really change your hair color.

But does something happen if you use shampoo for blond hair on dark hair? 

If you’re talking about shampoos that are made to make hair lighter, you can assume that here too little effect will be the result. These shampoos are made for lighter hair and can’t cope with darker hair.

If we look at the purple shampoo of for example Clairol Shimmer Lights it might just be that something does happen. On Youtube and on blogs you can hear a lot of blondes talking about this shampoo… So I did some more research on this shampoo and below I have the results.

Shampoo applied on wet hair

On wet hair not much actually happens. It may be a little bit lighter but that’s all.

Shampoo applied on dry hair

This makes only a small difference. Again, it’s more a maybe than a really big difference.

Just like the earlier mentioned shampoo of John Frieda, the Clairol Shimmer Lights shampoo does not happen very much to someone with darker hair.

What I want to add to this is that after some research this shampoo achieves some results in softening orange shades in brown hair. This makes the hair more even brown. Purple shampoo can help to soften the orange tones in your hair.

Can you use purple shampoo on brown hair?

This is certainly possible and the nourishing substances will really do their job when applied to the hair. However, purple shampoo (or shampoo specially made for blondes) doesn’t make much difference to lighten the hair.

So it’s not as if you could make your hair color significantly lighter with just shampoo. It does, however, allow you to remove some of the orange tones from your hair. This will give your hair a slightly more even tan. So if you suffer from orange tones in your hair, the use of a purple shampoo can be a solution.

What is the difference between the colors of shampoos?

You’ve heard me talking a lot about purple shampoo. Now you might wonder if there are more colors and what they are good for! I’ll explain that to you below!

Blue shampoo

If you look closely around you, every hair color has warm undertones. This is especially exposed when the hair becomes lighter in color or bleached. You’ll see that lighter hair colors have yellow undertones and darker hairs have orange undertones. That’s why I talked about reducing orange tones in the shampoo above.

So if you have blond hair or highlights, for example, you’ll see that the lighter colored hair sometimes turns yellow behind if you use shampoo often. If you have dark hair with highlights, for example, you will see that eventually, a brassy color will appear.

If we then look at which color neutralizes the best orange undertones you’ll end up with blue. Blue shampoo can make the brassiness go away and restore natural undertone.

Who is blue shampoo best for?

You can use blue shampoo best if you’re a brunette with highlights, balayage, or ombre. It can also work great if, for example, you’ve completely tanned your hair or if you’ve made a combination of brown hair with lighter shades. Blue shampoo is your solution!

Purple shampoo

As I said earlier in this article, purple shampoo is specially made for people with blond (silver and white) hair. Purple shampoo is a shampoo that disperses purple pigment so you can neutralize the yellow undertones and brassy look I was talking about earlier. Here too, just like we did with the blue shampoo, you can look at which color shampoo best neutralizes the yellow undertones. If you do that you’ll end up with purple. Purple and yellow cancel each other out and so you can get your natural look back by using purple shampoo!

Green colored shampoo

Blondes and brunettes are already quite used to neutralizing undertones. But for people with dark brown or black hair, it can sometimes be guessing. People with this hair color often suffer from red undertones and that’s exactly what this green shampoo was developed for!

If you look at a color wheel, green neutralizes the red color! So do you suffer from red undertones and do you want them out of your hair? Then go for a green shampoo! For example, there are the Total Results Dark Envy from Matrix that can help you with this.

Conclusion

We started talking about whether you can use shampoo for blonde hair on brown hair and you should see where we ended up! We talked about why you can use blonde shampoo on brown hair and how much effect it has. For example, we talked about John Frieda’s shampoo and Clairol Shimmer’s shampoo. Finally, we also looked at why there are now different colors of shampoos and why you should use them! I hope you’ve had some use for it :).

Go and experiment yourself and see what results you get! Have you found a shampoo for blond hair that works great on brown hair? Let me know! Then I can share it with everyone again!