The blonde guide to keeping your hair vibrant in lockdown

By Holly O'Neill
26th May 2020

The blonde guide to keeping your hair vibrant in lockdown

How to keep your hair glossy and vibrant when you can’t get to the hairdresser

If you’re a blonde with an unwanted home-grown balayage right now, trust me when I say to step away from the box dye. It’ll be so much worse in the long run. In the meantime, stick a hair mask in and wear a headband for the work Zoom meeting. But if your issue is discolouration, brassiness, texture or dullness, there are a few solutions.

Firstly, if you are considering your roots to be a crisis at this point, and even a gallery of purposely rooty blondes at the Golden Globes can’t salvage it, you might not yet be acquainted with the quick fix of L’Oreal Magic Retouch Root Concealer, €13.99. It’s a pathetically easy to use natural-looking concealer of roots and greys, suitable for all hair types. With a light spray stream so you don’t get it all over your scalp, just shake it, hold it 15cm away from your head and spray: it covers roots in 3 seconds and you leave to it to dry for 1 minute. Only a tiny bit is needed for temples and scattered greys and it washes out with your next shampoo. It’s like make-up for your hair.

L’Oreal Magic Retouch Root Concealer, €13.99

Next, if your hair issue is discolouration, stains, or stiffness, this problem is probably hard water. Hard water is a characteristic of much of Ireland’s water, meaning it contains chalk, lime and other minerals that stain fair hair. A hairdresser once told me that blonde hair is like white jeans. The dirt might not be instantly obvious but over time they’ll get grubbier and grubbier until they’re faded, stained and grimy looking. There is a solution for hard water hair – you need to give your hair a bit of a detox. Color Wow’s Dream Filter Pre-Shampoo Spray, €28, is sprayed into dry hair before shampooing. Leave it in for three minutes before shampoo and it’ll attract metals and minerals in your hair like a magnet, leaving your hair light, clean and bright blonde again. For extra help with hair stiffness, Pantene’s Hair Biology Full & Vibrant range, from €7.99, gives fuller, softer hair and seals in moisture with hyaluronic acid and Omega 9.

Color Wow Dream Filter Pre-Shampoo Spray, €28

Next, every blonde’s favourite product: purple shampoo. Some purple shampoos leave the hair feeling chalky and dry. This is not one of those. Kerastase has created one of the good ones. The Blond Absolu range has everything a blonde needs – nourishment, strength, anti-brassiness, heat-protection and the elusive shine so difficult to find in blonde hair. With two shampoos (one for illuminating, one for pigment neutralising perfection), one conditioner with the power of a mask, one heat-protecting hero and one nourishing mask, all blondes need this range to hand in their bathroom. The Redken Colour Extend Blondage range is another absolute no brainer for eliminating yellows and giving you a new head of blonde hair.

Kerastase Absolu Blond Bain Ultra Violet Shampoo, €25.50

Finally, if your hair trouble is a lack of shine, meet French haircare brand Klorane’s founding product, Shampoo with Chamomile, €11.50, available from pharmacies nationwide. It naturally enhances blonde and light-brown hair and lightens it with radiant, shiny honey highlights, while detangling and repairing the hair. It basically does what you thought putting lemon in your hair in the sun as a teenager was doing.