Colour correction

Colour correction is the work of taking hair that has gone wrong and bringing it back to a colour you would actually choose. Wrong shade, patchy, banded, dark at the ends and light at the roots, green through the blonde, orange through the middle. It is a different job from booking a colour, because a colour service starts from a known base and adds to it, while a correction starts from a decision somebody else made, or one you made at home with a box, and has to deal with that before it can do anything else.

What it is not

It is not a full head colour with a more expensive name. A full head colour puts one shade over everything and assumes what is underneath is reasonably even. Put that over hair that is already three different colours and you get three different results out of the same tube. It is not a toner either. Toning shifts the tone of hair that is already at the right level, so if the level is wrong, toning gives you a nicely toned version of the wrong colour.

Why it is priced and timed the way it is

Correction starts at £270 and is booked at around two hours. Both of those figures are starting points, and that is not hedging. The variable is your hair, not the salon. Two people can walk in describing the identical problem, brassy mid lengths after a home lightener, and need completely different amounts of work depending on how many times the hair has been coloured, what was used on it, how long ago that was, and what condition the hair is in underneath all of it.

What drives the number up is how much has to come off before anything can go on. Hair that has been dyed dark three or four times is holding a great deal of pigment, and pigment does not come out politely. Nobody can give you a final price down the phone. Anyone who does is guessing.

What happens across the appointment

The first stage is assessment, and it is not a formality. Your colourist reads the condition of the hair and works back through its colour history, because what is already sitting on the strand decides what can be lifted out of it and how quickly. The plan gets built after that, not before.

• Assessment of condition and colour history, including anything applied at home
• Colour removal where it is needed, to take out whatever is blocking the shade you want
• Balancing, so root, mid length and end read as one colour instead of three
• Toning, which is where the shade finally lands
• A conditioning treatment, because this is chemical work and the hair needs putting back together
• Styling, and a real conversation about how to keep it

That order rarely changes. How long each stage takes changes enormously, which is exactly why the appointment length is an estimate rather than a promise.

Sometimes it takes more than one visit

The limit on a correction is not skill or patience. It is what the hair will tolerate in one sitting. There is a point past which lifting more pigment stops improving the colour and starts wrecking the condition, and a colourist worth booking stops before that point rather than after it.

If your hair has been repeatedly dyed dark, or lightened and then coloured back over the top, the honest answer is often that one appointment gets you most of the way and a second one a few weeks later finishes it, with the hair in better shape for having waited. Occasionally the plan lands deliberately on a wearable in between shade first, because the colour you asked for is two steps away and taking both steps in one afternoon would cost you the length. You should hear all of this at the consultation, not at the till.

Booking it

Correction is done at both salons. At Old Street you would be with Asma, senior colourist and stylist, or Kevin, senior stylist and colour expert. Wembley Park runs its own colour team and its own diary, and there are separate pages covering how it works at that site and what the consultation there involves.

Booking goes through Fresha. Look early rather than late, because a two hour appointment does not drop into a gap between two haircuts. If you are not sure whether what you have is a correction or simply a colour you have gone off, book the consultation and ask. It is a much shorter conversation than living with it.