Book Review: The Hair Color Mix Book

By Celebrity colorist and Author: Lorri Goddard-Clark

Now I know this is a subject that is near and dear to our hearts…hair color! Hair can just make or break us. We all have good hair days and bad ones and most of us have either gone to the salon or colored at home at one time or the other. Me…it probably won’t surprise you to know that I’m a color at home girl and have been for many years, since going to college with a stylist who taught us all how to mix our own highlights. I’ve done salon color several times and end up always going back to DIY, since I didn’t think there was that much difference in how the color turned out and I can save so much money by doing it myself. For many years, I’ve just been doing home highlights, but for about the past 5 years, I’m doing the double process method: coloring all over and then adding highlights.

So, if you are a salon person who has always wanted to try coloring at home, here is a great book that I found at the library and it has step by step instructions on how to achieve that perfect color at home, using drugstore hair products. She has full color photos of celebrities and has given each of them a color name that you can emulate with her fabulous recipes and instructions.
From Lorri’s website: The Hair Color Mix Book begins with the most crucial step for a successful result: identifying your natural hair color. To help every woman select a target hair color that closely matches her natural shade and complements her eyes and skin tone, Lorri presents an eleven-color chart, a streamlined version of the tab system professional colorists have trusted for decades. With clear and true color photographs, step-by-step instructions, and lots of insider advice to guide them, at-home colorists everywhere will learn how to.…

She goes on to describe all the things you’ll learn in the book. I found it to be very informative and I think a novice hair colorist could pick up this book and walk away with the knowlege of how to color at home. It’s very much what I’ve already been doing at home for many years, so I didn’t learn a lot about changing up my color all that much, but it does go into great detail in how to achieve great color and highlights. She gives a lot of name brand recognition as well as step-by-step details. Once you pinpoint your natural color in the color chart that is in the book, then you can go on and choose the color you’d like to achieve referring to a number that matches up with your natural hair color, so you know just which one to look at and what products to buy. She gives detailed instructions for each of the colors, as well as a list of all the tools you’ll need, so you can’t go wrong. This is plain and simple drugstore boxed hair color that she is talking about. I already buy my products at Sally’s and get the individual color tint and developer and I’m pretty lucky in that I don’t have to color but about every 3-4 months (or I sometimes stretch it longer). I’m actually lighter than I use to be since my gray is white/platinum and my natural color was a dark strawberry blonde. Now, I use a permanent color to color my hair an overall medium to dark blonde shade & then go back and add a few highlights.
Here’s my tools that I keep around for mixing highlights. You get a big bottle of developer and that’s to mix your overall permanent hair tint AND highlights. This big bottle saves a lot of money in place of using the smaller drugstore kits with the added developer. It lasts a long time! Feria color from Sally’s, along with a highlight packet of powder. I experiment a lot with the base color I use (sometimes Feria, sometimes Loreal Preference) and I just did mine again recently (it had been since January). I think next time, I’ll use something with less of a gold base. I was surprised that this book just recommended off the shelf products. I really thought there was more of a difference in salon products, but apparently there isn’t. Now some of you who are reading this might be hair stylists and could totally disagree with what this book says, but the lady seems to know her stuff AND she has all the celebrity clients to prove it. I know that color is the way most stylists make the most money, but I’m all for saving when I can. I don’t think mine looks quite as good as her pics do, but I’m happy with it.
Highlights mixed and ready to apply. I usually use a cap to do my highlights. She describes in detail how to do threads and ribbons of highlights which seems more complicated to me, but the tools she uses are just a toothbrush and another dental hygiene tool that you can buy at the store. She uses some foil techniques, but unless you have help that would be hard to accomplish. Sometimes I take a shortcut and just paint it on, but I get better results if I use one of those plastic highlight caps to even it out. All my products cost about $10, with the bottle of developer around $6 or so and that lasts a long time. You can see how much moolah you can save. Need I say more?

If you get a chance to pick up this book, do it! And check out Lorri’s website. I found it to be very informative, interesting, and inspirational. Here’s to home hair color and if you’ve never tried coloring at home, maybe think about giving it a whirl. Sure saves the bucks!