No wonder they were giving it away (Boots Permanent Hair Colour)

Member Name: pink_glitter

Product:	Boots Permanent Hair Colour
Date:	02/10/07 (658 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy to follow instructions

Disadvantages: Bottle overflowed, keft hair dull, tiny bottle of conditioner

I got a coupon for a free box of Boots own brand hair dye from the Advantage point at Boots. I regularly dye my hair, but tend to use Garnier Nutrisse and L’Oreal casting, rather than own brands. As this was free though, I decided to give it a go.

~About the product~

This is a home hair dye kit, which gives permanent colour and covers greys. There are 10 different shades available in the Boots Colour range, from blonde through to black. I bought Rich dark brown.

~Packaging~

The kit comes packaged in the usual small cardboard box that most kits come in. I thought the design was quite nice, and although the product is cheaper than other ranges, it didn’t look particularly cheap. The only gripe I have is that the cardboard was quite thin, and the box appeared to be buckling a bit at the bottom.

~What’s in the kit?~

The kit contains a 45ml tube of hair colour, 45ml bottle of developing lotion, a 30ml tube of colour lock conditioner, an instruction leaflet and a pair of gloves.
The instruction leaflet is clearly set out, easy to follow and includes diagrams. I was also quite surprised to find that the gloves were the high quality ones, rather than those ‘plastic bag’ style gloves that make your hands sweat!

~Using the Kit~

48 hours before you use the kit you must perform a patch test to make sure you have no allergies to any of the ingredients. All being well you can then begin to apply the dye.

Firstly your hair must be clean and dry, and you must put on the gloves. The next step is mixing the colourant. To prepare, you simply squeeze the contents of the hair colour tube into the bottle of developing lotion and shake well. The main problem I found with this, was that the bottle of developing milk seemed so far, that when squeezing in the tube of colour it was overflowing. I managed to finally mix the two together and shook, but as soon as I unscrewed the tip from the spout of the bottle, the colour mixture started overflowing into the sink, and I seemed to lose half of it! I was beginning to see why they were giving this stuff away free!

Once the colourant had stopped spilling out, I started to apply it to my hair. They recommend parting your hair into four sections and then applying to one section at a time. This was quite easy to do as the bottle has a long nozzle which makes it easier to apply accurately. You then need to massage in and leave for 20 minutes.

Once this is done the next stage is to rinse until the water runs clear. I was quite shocked at how long it took to rinse all the dye out - about 10 minutes! I have never known it to take that long to rinse a dye out of my hair before, but however much I rinsed the water still appeared to be a murky brown colour.

When all the dye is finally rinsed out of your hair, the next step is to apply the colour lock conditioner. The 30ml tube supplied is supposedly enough for 3 treatments - my hair is quite long and there was no chance that I was going to get three treatments out of a tiny tube like that! I ended up using most of it in one go, and what was left in the tube wasn’t enough for a second application.

~The result~

The result was quite good, it covered my roots and the colour was like the one on the box, but I did think it looked quite dull, and it didn’t really seem to improve until I washed it again and used my normal conditioner. I only used this around a week ago, but the colour doesn’t seem to have faded at all since then.

~Price~

As mentioned I got this free, but if you were to buy it, it would set you back £2.99. Although the price is quite reasonable, I would rather pay a pound or two extra for one that didn’t overflow and take half an hour to clean off my bathroom sink!

~Overall verdict~

As I said above, I don’t think I would use this again. The fact that the bottle overflowed and made such a mess annoyed me, it took too long to rinse out, and the pathetically tiny bottle of conditioner all put me off using it again.

Summary: Boots own brand hair dye