So last week I bought these in Walmart for about $9.99 each.
Honestly, I think that’s more than a little excessively-priced for a semi-permanent, but L’Oreal and Walmart seem to think differently.
I got three colors, but first I tried teal and indigo in a sort of ombre.
They applied easily, didn’t smell funny, and I liked that the packs came with lots of gloves and a brush for precision.
The purple worked a lot stronger on my highlights than on the rest of my hair. I wasn’t in love with that, to be fair. It seemed a bit dull and toned down. I think my hair needed to be lighter than the darkest picture on the box, whereas my hair was exactly that same color of medium blonde.
The teal took to my hair easily and the color was vibrant and didn’t look flat or dead like a lot of green dyes do. I liked the result and would use it again.
I also liked the fact neither color ran and they didn’t stain the bathroom or my towels.
You apply the dye to wet, towel-dried hair, which means you have to get in the shower twice; once to make your hair wet and once to rinse the dye out. The downside of a wet application is that it’s difficult to see if you’ve covered every part of your hair with enough dye or not. The dye seemed to need to be applied more heavily than I did, especially the indigo (I used the enclosed brush) and I didn’t know that until I’d washed my hair out and dried it:
As you can see, it’s tricky to tell whether it’s completely covered or not.
The dye that went on my skin took about 24 hours to come off, btw.
The teal was a shiny color that left my hair looking happy, where the purple made my hair look a bit lifeless and dull. Honestly, when my hair dried, the indigo reminded me of this purple hair mascara I had when I was a 13-year-old in the ’90s.
I also felt like the purple came out much more patchy than the teal, as seen above.
The next day it settled better, but the purple still seemed patchy despite the fact I’d covered all those brown bits in purple dye. I have never had a dye do this to me before and I applied this with a brush so I’m not sure what else I could do.
Overall, I think I liked the green a lot more than the purple, which says that your experience of L’Oreal Colorista will completely depend on what color you get.
It’s also worth noting that, despite the claims that this lasts 4-8 washes on the purple and 8-16 washes on the teal, they both looked a little less vibrant after 2 washes, and by wash 5 or 6 I doubt the purple would still be visible. You would probably want to reapply this at least once a week, possibly twice, to get a color buildup that lasts a bit longer than a couple of washes.
You can get the teal here on Amazon currently for just over $8, but I’m not linking to the indigo because it wasn’t great so I can’t recommend that anyone buys it.
I’ve also got one of the red ones to try so I’ll maybe write about that at some point soon, too.
