Not for lightening hair from coloured to blonde (Schwarzkopf Live)

Member Name: sallyonsunday

Product:	Schwarzkopf Live
Date:	18/08/09 (159 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy if your hair is light

Disadvantages: smell, will not lift darker or red hair, dye does not take well over it.

I've recently used the live xxl colour in platinum and thought i'd give you a quick rundown of its blonding abilities.

Now my friend used this, and i was really impressed- after 2 boxes she did manage to get a nice platinum blonde colour. Until the sun shone on it. And when she went outside it was luminous yellow. It was back to the drawing board for her. She also found that she could not colour over it with her usual red- the dye simply would not take. Stupidly undeterred by this, i decided to have a go with it myself.

My hair was dyed dark brown, and after mixing the stuff up, the first thing i noticed was the horrible ammonia smell. Now this was nowhere near as bad as some like nice n' easy for example, where the smell is literally choking, but it wasn't pleasant.

After 45 minutes on my hair, rinse off. it was orange. Great. So i had no other option but to try it again. This time, yellow.

Now live does have exceptional blonding abilities for a dye, but by no stretch is it a bleach. It wasnt really blonde, rather a rather humilating shade of orangey yellow with dark ends. I have shoulder length thick curly hair so i had to use 4 boxes in total, and i didnt get a very good result at all.

However, having said this, i know some friends have had successes with this- but their hair was blonde to begin with. it did my roots fairly well, but the rest of it was horrible to be honest.

i could only recommend this to you if your hair was pretty untreated to start with. I had to go and get jerome russell's highlighting kit, which is a bleach for darker hair, to get a good result.

In summary, i'd say if your hair is already coloured dark or red, i would avoid this, and go straight for a bleach product as this dye was simply not strong enough, so a waste of time.

Summary: not for people with pre-coloured hair.