Oh, wow, did I ever mess up. If you’re here, I’m guessing you did, too. Let’s commiserate together and talk about how not to get rid of unwanted turquoise, blue and green hair dye.
Some of them may say “semi-permanent” on the box, but as I found out, and you probably have, too, there is no such thing as a semi-permanent blue, green or turquoise dye. That stuff never leaves your hair. And now there’s a lockdown and the hairdressers can’t fit you in, and even if they could, you’ve lost work hours and can’t afford to pay a stylist to do a colour correction. Life really throws lemons sometimes, doesn’t it?
I’m assuming here that the reason you need to get rid of this blue or green dye is because your employer or school has a dress code that specifically says you’ll be in some kind of trouble if you show up with green, blue or turquoise hair. The goal of this article is to get your hair looking like a natural colour again so you don’t get a disciplinary or suspended or something like that.
Unfortunately, from a chemistry point of view, these blue and green dyes actually are semi-permanent. But any hair dye with a blue base (so, blue, green and turquoise, also some purples) generally causes a lot of cuticle staining, especially if you put it on bleached hair, so getting rid of blue hair is nigh on impossible.
It’s worth noting that colour remover doesn’t work for semi-permanent dyes, if you want to know more about why this is, check out this article about how colour remover works).
To diagnose how bad your problem is, wash your hair two or three times in the space of a day, drying it between washes (condition loads in between and maybe add coconut oil so your hair doesn’t dry out from shampoo).
Ideally, use some anti-dandruff shampoo such as Head and Shoulders, because there’s something in the anti-dandruff part of it that makes hair dye fade.
If the green, blue or turquoise is fading, you might be able to get it to disappear enough that most people won’t notice it. If it’s not fading much, keep reading to find out what to do.
My experience with two blue-based hair dye disasters and what I learned
I have made the mistake of using semi-permanent blue and green twice in the past 18 months. Once was on purpose, the other was a tragic accident.
First, I used the L’Oreal Colorista Teal semi-permanent dye when I was in California. I put it on bleached hair. I thought it was a fun colour when I first used it. Then it faded to a Halloween witch colour. It said it would be gone in 6 washes and I believed it. When I discovered I was stuck with this green colour, I Googled straight away and found an article on a mom blog from someone who said her son had used the exact same dye and she’d found an amazing homemade remedy to fix his hair (tl;dr she hadn’t).
It said to mix baking powder with dish soap (washing up liquid), make a big paste, put it on my hair, cover it with a bag and leave it for about 15 minutes.
Almost immediately, where the mixture touched my neck, it irritated my skin. Stupidly, I left it the full 15 minutes on my hair. Bad plan. Such a bad plan.
…Yeah, so, long story short, that shit burnt my hair so bad it was permanently frazzled and STILL BLUE-GREEN! I had to cut the ends off. I was so glad I’d only done a teal ombre. Dawn is GREAT on dishes but it wasn’t designed for hair dye removal.
DO NOT USE BAKING POWDER WITH DISH SOAP ON YOUR HAIR! I guess I’m putting it in shouty capitals for all the people who aren’t on this page yet in the hope they hear me before it’s too late.
This is what my hair looked like after I dried it (you can see how frazzled and damaged it is, and it still has that green tinge. I was so upset I had been such a beautiful silver a few days earlier):
Anyway, 12 months later, I was in New York for a crucial work conference and I’d picked up some violet Crazy Color, so I put it on the ends of my hair.
Violet Crazy Color is a lie. When I started applying it, it turned out it’s bright blue. I stopped applying it and washed it off immediately but it had already stuck, as you’ll see in the next photo. Horrendous if you were expecting a delicate pale purple tint like the bottle implies. I’m starting to wonder if whoever names/labels the bottles at Renbow Crazy Color is a sadist who purposely mis-names the colours so people have hair disasters.
Seriously, I should have suspected after the Crazy Color Silver was a platinum blonde and Crazy Color Platinum was a beautiful silver shade. I forgot. I was beyond upset. But really it was partly my own fault because I should have strand tested and I was in such a hurry I didn’t.
Anyway, during that disaster, I knew better than to try the baking powder again, and I didn’t have time to fix it any other way so I put L’Oreal Colorista Lilac on the blonde bits which made a nice effect that at least looked intentional but didn’t hide the blue.
When the conference was over, I tried bleaching it out instead.
That didn’t work either. So I put a silver dye over it all. That sort of worked but it faded in a few weeks to a sort of very very pale pastel blue staining that was patchy, and every time I tried toning it out with the Crazy Colour Platinum (yeah, I keep going back to them… I have a problem haha), it made the blue (which by this point had washed out to a nasty seaweed green shade) more obvious. So I eventually coloured over it with a medium brown and left it alone.
Basically what had happened is called “cuticle staining”. This is more common with semi-permanent, bright colours, but can also happen with permanent hair dyes, especially red hair dyes. Cuticle staining is where the outside of the hair shaft has been permanently stained with a colour. At that point, normal bleach for hair will only lift the underlying shade, not the staining, and, even worse news, colour remover can’t get at it, either.
Okay, so from my story you now know you probably can’t take the blue dye, turquoise dye or green dye out of your hair because they have caused cuticle staining. Take a deep breath.
We can still fix this. Just maybe not the way you wanted to. You can still get your hair to a point where you can go to school or work again, but you will need to be flexible about what colour your hair ends up because it can’t be blonde now until the stained parts grow out again.
At that point, cuticle staining needs to be cut out of the hair before you can bleach, and in the meantime, you need to take care not to accidentally use another product that might cause cuticle staining further up the hair shaft. This is especially important if you intend to go blonde at any point in the next two years, if that’s you, avoid bright red hair dyes while trying to fix the unwanted green or blue colour.
When trying to get rid of blue dyes (ones with a blue base), you have three options, and three things that don’t work.
What doesn’t work to get rid of blue or green hair dye:
Bleach
Baking powder and washing up liquid
Color remover
What works to get your hair looking natural again:
Dying your hair red (avoid bright or deep shades of red if you want to be white blonde in the next year or two)
Dying your hair ginger
Dying your hair brown (avoid dark brown or black as it seems like a great idea, but it’s a nightmare to get back out of your hair and you’ll be left with the green again. Also some black dyes use a green base which will make your cuticle staining even worse if you ever bleach it)
My suggestion (actually this is similar to the answer to what you should do if you’ve wrecked your hair with bleach) is to choose a box dye in one of the three colours above, either red, brown or ginger, and put that over the blue, green or turquoise. If your hair is bleached, remember you need to add some red to your hair before you can get a brown permanent dye to take.
Your only other option, if you can get away with it is to completely own this shade of green/blue (or put a nice bright colour like purple or turquoise on top) and learn to live with it until it grows out. I hear washed-out mermaid is pretty big in some places.
Other hair colouring articles you might like:
How to get better results from colour remover and how colour remover works
Wrecked your hair with bleach? Fix it!
Hair bleaching 101: How to bleach your hair
What do I use between the silver shampoos?
What colour will that box dye really go on your hair?
