Wednesday, August 15, 2012

How To Dye Dark Hair With Koolaid

Lots of you come here to my blog searching for this info, so I'm going to tell you how you can dye your dark hair with koolaid. I'm sure you've seen the photos of girls with brown or black hair and colorful hair tips. There are some ways you can achieve this too.

This is red koolaid on brown hair (dip dyed). You can just barely see the red tint at the bottom.


If you are going to use koolaid in particular to dye your hair, you'll likely need to lighten your hair. There are other methods to getting colorful hair without lightening, such as using hair chalk or eye shadow but this blog is mostly about using koolaid.

Note: If you decide to lighten your hair, you take full responsibility of any outcome. I am not an expert and I don't claim to be. I'm just sharing popular ways of lightening hair at home.

For medium brown hair:

Well, if your hair isn't very dark, you can use the lemon lightening technique. Just pour equal amounts of lemon juice and water into a spray bottle, soak the parts of your hair that you want to be lightened, and go hang out in the backyard for a while (30 minutes, an hour, or more). Once you are done, rinse it off and put some leave-in conditioner in your hair. You can also use coconut oil which is a great natural moisturizer and conditioner for the hair. You may need to repeat the lemon lightening several times before you get your hair light enough to dye it. Remember that this can cause damage to the hair if you do it over and over, so it's best to watch for signs of damage and condition your hair!

If you wanted red hair tips and you have medium brown hair, you may get a great color without even having to lighten your hair. Try the dip dye method using Black Cherry or Strawberry koolaid. For other colors such as blue and purple, it's best to lighten the hair.

For dark brown hair:

If you have dark brown hair, lemon probably will do nothing for you. You might need to use honey to lighten your hair. Natural honey contains a small amount of peroxide which lightens your hair. Cleopatra used honey to lighten her hair and skin. Just because it's honey, doesn't mean it won't cause some damage so it's best to condition your hair well afterwards. The ingredients you'll need are: room temperature distilled water, a dark-colored honey, virgin coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil.

The Long Hair Community recommends these guidelines for the BEST honey lightening results:

1. Dampen the hair with water.

2. For every 1 tablespoon of honey used, add 6 tablespoons of water. The amount you use will vary depending on how long and thick your hair is. You'll only want to put the honey on parts of your hair that you want lightened.

3. Add honey, water, and 1/2 teaspoon of oil in a cup.

4. Apply the mixture to your hair using whatever method works best for you. For example, you can use your fingers, a spray bottle, a brush.

5. Cover your hair with a plastic cap and keep it that way for 1 hour. If it drips too much, you can use saran wrap and then put a plastic cap over it.

6. After 1 hour, rinse the hair out well and condition the hair. If you hair becomes dry because of the honey, just use a good leave-in conditioner.

You should see results from this. If you still can't get your hair as light as you need it to be, you may want to get your hair bleached by a professional.

For black hair:

You will likely not benefit from honey or lemon lightening, although you can try it if you want. You will most likely need to get your hair lightened by a stylist.

General information:

Once you have successfully lightened your hair, it's easy to dye it with koolaid. You can visit one of my many instructional articles to find out how:

How to dye hair with Strawberry koolaid, Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade koolaid, Grape koolaid.

The lightening techniques described in this blog post can possibly dry hair out and cause damage. If you are experimenting with your hair at home, make sure you know what you are doing and take good care of your hair. Good conditioners and things like virgin coconut oil (food grade) can help protect your hair and prevent damage. You are taking responsibility for your hair.

Koolaid is not guaranteed to rinse out of hair quickly. I have made a post about this here. You should know that you are never guaranteed that, so make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. You may need to take extra steps to get the koolaid to fade faster. It could take months to fade completely from your hair, although this has never happened to me personally.

20 comments:

  1. Hey, I have dark brown hair and I tried lightening the tips with lemon juice but I didn't see much of a difference. How light do you think the honey will make my hair?

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    1. It will likely raise the hair 2 to 3 shades the first time. I've looked at before and after photos of some people on LHC who have lightened their hair with honey and if you do it the way they suggest, you should see a good amount of lightening.

      Now, will it be enough to see koolaid in your hair? If you are doing a color like blue, it will likely turn dark green because your hair won't be close enough to white. Even in my hair it turns aqua marine (not quite blue) because my hair isn't bleached. If you are doing red, you'll be just fine.

      You can also choose to lighten your hair with honey once a week until it's light enough. Just make sure you condition that hair.

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    2. i have black hair and i used 5 packets of cherry koolaid and it is still dark and i love it.

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    3. That's really awesome. I never thought it would work well in black hair. I bet it looks good.

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  2. To Girl, how dark is your hair? I actually just want to color one small section (a thick strand behind my ear), but I have dark dark brown hair, but not that close to black. I want to color it an aqua marine color and your comment caught my eye. Tips on how you got that color? Thanks :)

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    1. This is my blog so a lot of the posts you see on here show my hair color. It's really light. The people I'm talking about are part of a community called The Long Hair Community. It's a forum where people who are obsessed with long hair can go and talk about growing their hair and preventing damage and all that good stuff. They use honey to lighten hair because it's supposed to cause less damage. The area that talks extensively about honey lightening can be found here: http://forums.longhaircommunity.com/showthread.php?t=148

      There are plenty of before and after pictures that can be found in the links and there are lots of tips too. They know more about it. It's probably the most extensive database about honey lightening that you can find. It's like one big science experiment.

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  3. Hi,

    My hair is also dark brown, and I want to take a small (but fairly thick) section of my hair (the part I normally tuck behind my ear) and dye it an greenish blue, aqua color, the kind of aqua marine you mentioned in your reply to Anonymous. How did you do that? Also, how dark is your hair? What kind of colors did you use? Etc.
    It doesn’t have to be super strong but I don’t want it to be faded either. I don't trust myself to do the bleaching right, and honestly I don’t want to have to put in that much work to get it colored. And I want to do it with Kool Aid. Hopefully it'll stay for 2-4 months but I'm good with any amount of time. Any suggestions/tips?

    Thanks a bunch!!

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    Replies
    1. My hair is really light, close to blonde. It has a lot of blonde in it. But it's like golden so when I add blue it turns aqua marine for a day and when it fades, it turns green. In order to get a really blue color, you would need to bleach. Even then, your hair would probably still be really yellow since it's so dark. The only thing you can really do for dark brown hair is try to lighten it with honey. When you dye it blue, it will probably turn greenish.

      You might also try mixing blue koolaid with purple koolaid to prevent the green color. I haven't tried it yet, but it's supposed to make it more blue and less green. I'm going to try it soon though and make a post about it. Look at this post about honey lightening: http://forums.longhaircommunity.com/showthread.php?t=148

      It will tell you all you need to know and there are some before and after pictures. Maybe someone has your color hair and you can see what the "after" would be.

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  4. Hey girls, You know what I completely forgot about? Hair chalk. You won't have to lighten your hair if you color it with chalk. I'll be doing some posts about that soon.

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  5. Hey I have jet black hair & I was planning to dip dye it with kool aid... I was wondering how it will work.... Can you help me out here?
    ASAP! *

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    Replies
    1. All you have to do is try it. The best that can happen is it will dye your hair like you want. The worst that can happen is it won't show up. I see no problem here.

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  6. I have brown ish hair but I dyed it blue and it looks darker brown what should I do?
    Thanks

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    1. You can simply let it fade out if it doesn't bother you much. Blue usually takes about a week to 10 days to fade out of my hair. It should come out a lot more quickly for you since you won't even notice it once it's faded to a certain degree. If it bothers you that much, dip your hair in warm baking soda water.

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  7. Hey anonymous, I have dark brown nearly black hair and I want to use cherry kool aid to dye my hair so that it has a reddish tint. I don't want full blown color. I just want my hair to have a red tint. How do I do that? How many packets should I use? How long do I leave it in? How long will it last?

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    1. What up?

      Use 2-3 packets probably.. depending on how thick your hair is. You probably won't have full blown color anyway, since you say your hair is almost black, so this will give you the tint you want.

      If you are dip dying, 30 minutes. If you are mixing the packets with conditioner you may want to use a few more packets and leave it over night.

      Now, these are just suggestions and it's best for you to do a strand test. Dye a small area and then see for yourself before dying a whole lot.

      How long it will last is different for everyone... Mine lasts about 2-4 weeks. Some people get it out in one wash and for some, it never fades unless they cut it out. Can't tell you why, but koolaid is just a weird thing.

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  8. All I did for my medium brown hair was put the kool-aid packet in a small pan add a little bit if water and brought it to a boil..soaked my hair in it immediately for about 3 minutes and my hair turned out amazingly red!! My cousin with even darker hair did the same and it turned out awesome

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    1. Hmm, I've heard of people using boiling water. I'd never actually suggest it because it's probably a bit more permanent that way, but if that's what you want then I guess it's good.

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    2. Anonymous did you rinse your hair right after that with conditioner and did you put conitioner in the kool-aid?

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    3. And how many packets did you use thanks ahead of time

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