More beauty on a budget: hair color

Most of you know that I cut my own hair (and surprise, surprise, I don't look like a cave woman!!!) I go in for a professional hair cut once per year (using a coupon -- with tip, I will only get a "real" haircut if I can come out for about $10 -- yeah, I'm a cheap old lady!) After giving myself a trim, I'll often get someone in the family to check and even up the back for me.

I've been wearing my hair plain old, ordinary, shoulder-length, for several years. So, a few weeks ago, thinking my hair needed an update, I followed my daughters, and cut bangs. Meh. . . just center-part bangs, nothing that I thought was anything special. But then, one daughter said I should sweep them off to one side, for side-swept bangs. Much improved!

Hair looking styled -- next up, color. I understand that many women love their gray hairs. Maybe when I have more of them, I will too. But for now, as I tell my sister, they just make the top of my head look dusty. Supposedly, stress = gray hair. Well, my head tells the story of the past few years of my life. A ton of grays came in.  So, for the past 3 years, I've been covering the grays with a semi-permanent color. I love it. It looks very much like my natural color, and fades slowly.

I do a few things to make hair color frugal. First, the obvious one, I use a coupon (usually $2 off) to buy the color when it's on sale (often for $6.99/box). So my net cost is $4.99. Not bad. And, I only color my hair once every 3 months. For now, that works for me.

But then, I do one other thing with the boxed color to save money. I only use half of the product at a time.

The brand I use comes in two parts, the developing creme, in an applicator bottle, and the colorant, in a squeeze tube. With a sharpie, I mark the half-way point on the developing creme bottle. I take the lid off, and pour the developing creme, roughly to that mark on the bottle, into a small glass bowl. Then I eyeball the colorant, adding half of that product to the developing creme. I mix the two together with a plastic spoon, and apply to my hair. The hair color can be split for two uses this way. I wash and save the plastic gloves that come with the box. The next time I color my hair, I simply mix the remaining colorant with the remaining developing creme in the creme bottle, as instructed. You cannot mix the two, then save half.

My cost per application, then, is about $2.50. I color my hair 4-5 times per year, so my total hair color cost is $10-12. Not bad.

I have found that most of the drug store brands of hair color have enough product to divide in half for two applications, if :

• your hair is somewhat short (mine is shoulder length)
• you are staying close to your original hair color, so that if any hairs don't get thoroughly saturated, it won't be detectable (the color I chose is similar to my natural hair color, but has a tad more red highlights)
• you have relatively few gray hairs to cover (I have under 10% of my total hairs coming in gray)

I have also heard of women who have more gray hair, splitting their box of hair color into 3/4 and 1/4 of product. They use the 3/4 of product for original color, then at about 6 weeks, the other 1/4 portion as a touch-up for the grays which have shed the color and to cover their root zone. 

When I first began splitting my boxes of hair color I couldn't find much info on whether or not this was doable. So, I'm just putting this out there, as yet another person who successfully splits boxes of hair color, for two applications.

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