Have you noticed that your blonde tresses aren’t as bright as they used to be? Or are you a brunette who was blonde once upon a time? If so, you may be wondering, “Why did my blonde hair turn brown?”
Many natural blondes go darker over time and end up brunette by early adolescence or even later. If you’re wondering why that happened, we can help. In this article, we’ll reveal several reasons why blonde hair turns brown. Let’s get right into it!
Table of Contents
1 A Quick Look at the Genetics of Blonde Hair
2 Why Did My Blonde Hair Turn Brown?
2.1 Your Hair Pigment Genes Were Activated
2.2 Your Water Is Betraying You
2.3 You Have Build-up
2.4 You’ve Burned Your Hair
2.5 You Went Overboard With the Purple Shampoo
3 How to Prevent Blonde Hair From Darkening
3.1 Stop Brassiness
3.2 Address Your Hard Water Issue
3.3 Keep Your Hair Buildup-Free
3.4 Lay Off the Heat
4 If Nothing Works
4.1 Related Articles
A Quick Look at the Genetics of Blonde Hair
Before we get into the culprits behind darkening hair, you need to know why you were blonde in the first place.
The color of our hair, skin, and eyes depends on our unique distribution of melanin (natural pigment). There are two main types of melanin: pheomelanin and eumelanin.
Eumelanin is responsible for dark hair, skin, and eyes, and we all have varying quantities of it. Dark-haired people have a surplus of eumelanin, while blondes have very little of it.
We’re all born with genes that determine how much melanin our bodies make.
Why Did My Blonde Hair Turn Brown?
Now that you know the basics concerning why you had blonde hair, it’s time to get into the reasons why your blonde hair turned brown. Some of the reasons may surprise you!
Your Hair Pigment Genes Were Activated
Many aren’t aware that pigment genes can turn on and off, but it’s a relatively common phenomenon. Your hair pigment genes may be activated or deactivated based on a variety of factors, one of the most common being your hormones.
You could experience a hormone-related hair color shift at any age (e.g., white or gray hair), but here are the most probable times hormones could be to blame:
Around the time you start school – about 6 years old.
During puberty – from middle school to high school.
During or after pregnancy.
*Note that many other things can cause genes to activate or deactivate.
So, if some of your previously inactive eumelanin-producing genes were suddenly activated, this could be to blame for your color change.
In addition to this, eumelanin production generally speeds up as you get older, and this can cause your blonde hair to take on a darker hue. Researchers are not exactly sure why eumelanin production speeds up with age.
Your Water Is Betraying You
Another cause of blonde hair discoloration is hard water. Hard water has a high mineral count. These minerals can fill your hair shaft, causing it to become brassy and appear darker.
Around 85% of American households have hard water. Even if you are among the lucky few who don’t have hard water, your plumbing might still be a problem.
If you live in an older building with copper or lead pipes, the minerals from those pipes can still leave you with darkening hair. Chlorinated water can also result in a color change.
You Have Build-up
We all need a fresh start now and isn’t and your hair isn’t exempt. Almost everything we put on our hair has the potential to build up: hair gel, hairspray, and conditioner are common ones.
Build-up coats the hair shaft, causing it to take on a darker hue.
But even if you don’t use many products on your hair, you can still get build-up from air pollution. Your blonde hair acts like a sponge and can suck up smog, smoke, and other things in the air.
You’ve Burned Your Hair
Heat can also cause your natural blond hair to darken. If you’ve ever seen hair burn, you’ll notice that it takes on a darker shade. This same thing can happen to your hair if you overuse heat and neglect to use a heat protectant.
You Went Overboard With the Purple Shampoo
Many blondes who notice their hair getting darker or brassy use purple shampoo or conditioner to brighten it back up. These products deposit a small amount of purple dye onto the outer hair shaft to neutralize any wonky tones.
But if you use purple shampoo during every wash, it can work against your hair, making it look darker.
How to Prevent Blonde Hair From Darkening
If the cause of your darkening hair is genetic, there’s nothing you can do about it (i.e., your hair follicles produce more melanin). However, if an outside influence is to blame, there are some things that can do to keep your tresses from darkening further.
After all, if you don’t do anything to prevent it, your hair may continue to darken. Keep reading to find out what you can do to preserve your blonde hue (or what’s left of your light hair color):
Stop Brassiness
Brassy yellow and orange tones can creep up in natural blonde hair just like they can in bleached blonde hair.
To remedy this, protect your hair from chlorinated water. Before hopping in the pool, wet your hair down with clean water from your shower or tap, and then put on a shower cap.
You can also slather on a ton of hair conditioner before covering it up. Doing so will keep the chlorine from coming in contact with your hair.
Address Your Hard Water Issue
Hard water is one of the biggest contributors to unwanted hair color change. To combat this, invest in a shower head filter. It will rid your water of chlorine, minerals, and other contaminants that can darken your hair over time.
In addition to that, you can try the following:
Use a chelating shampoo. Chelating shampoos are stronger than clarifying shampoos and help strip the minerals from your hair. Ion’s Hard Water Shampoo is one of the best chelating shampoos on the market.
Do a deep clarifying treatment. If your blonde hair has already taken on some unwanted brassy or darker tones due to hard water, you might need a stronger clarifying treatment. You can either schedule a clarifying treatment at a salon (often called a “crystal treatment”) or perform one yourself at home. Malibu C Blondes Wellness Hair Remedy packets are a single-use treatment made with Vitamin C and Citric Acid. This treatment not only helps strip out the mineral build-up but also brightens and restores shine.
Keep Your Hair Buildup-Free
With all of the hair products and treatments we use on a regular basis, many find it difficult to prevent buildup. But you can do it if you have the right product – namely, clarifying shampoo.
Clarifying shampoo is similar to regular shampoo but with more cleansing power. Depending on your hair type, you may need to use it as often as once a week. We urge you not to use it more often than that – you’ll leave your hair dry and crunchy.
Lay Off the Heat
Since excessive heat can lead to darkening tresses, all you’ll need to do is limit your heat usage and always use a heat protectant. Whenever you do use heat, keep the temperature as low as possible.
If Nothing Works
If the above remedies don’t slow or stop the darkening of your hair, you have a couple of options:
Accept the fact that your hair is meant to be dark.
Take steps to lighten your tresses with natural or chemical methods.
Lemon juice – Spray your hair with lemon juice and olive oil (equal parts), and then get some sunlight outside for about a half-hour. Don’t forget to wear sunscreen to protect your skin. After the session, condition or deep condition your hair to restore its moisture levels. Repeat this treatment every couple of days or so until you achieve your desired level of lightening.
Use bleach or hair dye to lighten your strands chemically. Hair dye is a better choice than bleach when it comes to the health of your hair. But you’ll be able to get more drastic lightening results with bleach.
Related Articles
Why Is My Hair Color Changing?
Reasons to Dye Your Hair
Black People With Natural Blonde Hair
What Is the Rarest Hair Color?
We hope that this article has given you some helpful insight into why your hair has darkened over time. With the information in this article, you can take calculated steps to reduce the chances of your hair darkening further.
Kenneth Byrd( Co-founder and Owner )
Kenneth Byrd holds a BS in Accounting and Management Information Systems and an MBA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. With over 15 years of experience, Kenneth has been dedicated to hair care since 2008, when he co-founded Curl Centric® and Natural Hair Box alongside his wife. As a team, they promote healthy hair care practices through their comprehensive platform, Curl Centric. Curl Centric is a website operated by a husband and wife team that encourages healthy hair care. At Curl Centric, we aim to help our readers take control of their hair care journey and make good decisions about products, hairstyles, and maintenance techniques. We also have strict editorial integrity; here’s an explanation of our editorial guidelines and how we make money.
It is probably your water. Blonde hair will not revert back to brown. Blonde hair does not fade to a darker color. Minerals in tap or well water can coat porous blonde hair making it appear darker.
Changes in age, nutrition, temperature, sun exposure and various other factors can cause our bodies to change the amounts or types of hormones we make. The genes for making melanin might turn on or off over a lifetime, causing your hair color to change.
Blondes aren't blondes forever. (Naturally, at least.) Many kids born with light hair go dark before their tenth birthday, thanks to rising levels of eumelanin, a natural pigment that regulates the darkness of hair strands.
If you want to prevent your natural blonde hair from darkening, use a purple shampoo when washing your hair, which will restore its blue tones and prevent brassiness. For a home remedy, mix equal parts pure lemon juice and water.
If you want to make your hair blonder, you can choose from natural lightening ingredients or chemical lightening products. Exposure to the sun lightens your hair, so spend as much time as you can outside! In addition, you can use ingredients like lemon juice, vitamin C, and saltwater to lighten your hair with sunlight.
The short answer is because blonde hair is lighter, or less pigmented, than all other hair colors. Less pigmentation means that there is less color saturation in the hair, leaving room for outside substances to stain and color the hair (think of how white sheets stain more easily than brown or black ones).
The rarest natural hair colour is red, which makes up only one to two percent of the global population. You commonly see these hair colours in western and northern areas of Europe, especially Scotland and Ireland. However, natural redheads may not exist for much longer.
Because blond hair tends to turn brown with age, natural blond hair is significantly less common in adulthood; according to the sociologist Christie Davies, only around five percent of adults in Europe and North America are naturally blond.
The more you shampoo with tone-correcting products, the more buildup you create — and the darker your blonde looks. “Chemicals start to build up as you layer on more [toner], making it overcrowded and muddy with layers of product and minerals,” Miller explains.
Brassy hair is caused by an overabundance of warm pigments in your hair, usually caused by bleaching and the hair coloring process. Brass usually shows up as yellow or orange tones in blonde hair and orange or red tones in brunette hair.
It will last longer, too, but not forever, so it's not permanent in that sense. It lasts until it grows out, essentially. It won't fade after washing, but you may need to retouch your roots after 4 to 6 weeks, depending on how fast your hair grows.
How Often Should I Use Purple Shampoo? Keep in mind that purple shampoo does not replace your regular shampoo and should only be used once or twice a week. Doss warns that there is such a thing as too much purple.
Purple shampoo is a toning shampoo specially designed for blonde hair. It features crushed violet pigments that neutralize style-ruining brassy and yellow tones. On the color wheel, purple is the opposite of yellow, which is why purple pigments cancel out brassy, yellow tones.
Whether blonde or brunette, many tones can benefit from a purple shampoo. The unexpected hue may just be the secret to keeping your color fresh and vibrant. Using a purple toning shampoo is a key step in keeping your hair color looking fresh, vibrant, and like you just left the salon.
Ideally, you should be visiting your colourist for a root touch up every 4 to 6 weeks if you have a global colour such as a white blonde scalp bleach (otherwise known as pre-lightening) This isn't purely because it'll look better, but for scientific reasons, too.
Natural bleaching agents like apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, chamomile tea, or cinnamon and honey can lighten hair gently and naturally with minimal damage. Rinse your hair in a solution of warm water and one or more of these lightening agents, then sit in the sun to dry.
Purple shampoo is for already bleached hair, so if you're hoping to lighten brown hair with purple shampoo, you'll be disappointed. This is all down to the fact that purple shampoo isn't lightening. Instead, it brightens blondes by canceling out yellow tones, which just happen to be opposite purple on the color wheel.
It is thought that Palaeolithic hunters chose blondes because they stood out from their rivals and were more likely to be healthy. Many women who are blonde go darker as they age, so blonde hair is also viewed as an indicator of youth, and sexual vitality.
Like the skin, hair is exposed to the sun, and therefore UV rays, during the summer. Your hair reacts to the sun, as does your skin, by changing colour. The sun slightly bleaches your hair, even more if you expose your hair to seawater or swimming pool water (that contains bleach).
According to the survey, the majority of men (42%) found blonde hair to be the most attractive. This was followed by brunette (36%), red (16%), black (5%), and gray (1%). ... Most Attractive Hair Colour According to Men.
'It's extremely rare for people to have hair that is naturally a strawberry blonde color. Basically, strawberry blonde is mostly based on red tones, with blonde highlights dotted here and there. It takes its name from the Italian renaissance.
Red is the rarest hair color, according to Dr. Kaplan, and that's because so few MC1R variants are associated with the shade. “Only three variants are associated with red hair,” she says. “If a person has two of these three variants, they almost certainly have red hair.
As the population grows and people have babies, the genes for less melanin will become more common. That makes the link between lighter eyes, hair, and skin tighter. So that's why you see people with blond hair typically have blue eyes!
Finland. The people of Finland have one of the highest concentrations of blond hair in the world. In large portions of Finland, 80% of the population has blond hair (and a full 89% of the population has blue eyes).
Lighter tint gives rise to lighter coloured eyes, including blue, but also varying tones of green and grey. So, just because you have blonde hair, it doesn't mean that you have blue eyes too.
The results revealed that, compared to women with dark hair, men found light-haired ladies more attractive overall, but more specifically, perceived them as younger and healthier. However, there is one downfall of blondes, apparently — they were also seen as more promiscuous, which is generally not a good thing.
But some children with light hair, including towhead blonds, strawberry blonds, dishwater blonds and redheads, see their hair go dark brown by their 10th birthday. The reason for this change is because the amount of eumelanin in your hair increases as you mature, according to some research.
How Rare Is Dirty Blonde Hair? About 2 percent of the population are natural blondes, but it's a very popular hair color because many turn to hair dye to achieve it. Brighter blonde shades like ashy blonde and beige blonde are more popular choices than dirty blonde, so you can consider dirty blonde a bit more unique.
That being said, cool blondes tend not to look great on those who have fair skin with cool undertones, or on those with olive-colored skin, because they can leave you looking washed out. These skin tones tend to pair better with warmer shades of blonde, like honey, amber, and even strawberry tones.
The purple shampoo can cause build up making the hair look dull and darker if overused." This makes the lightening process more difficult to create a seamless blend.
Natural or warmer shades will usually compliment you best. Think, creamy blonde, beachy, milkshake, beige, buttery, honey, caramel and rich. If you have cool skin tones, ash and platinum blonde tones will produce a harmonised look.
Hair toners are used to help neutralize any unwanted brassy or warm tones, and can include demi-permanent color or glosses, which can be applied by a professional colorist at the hair salon for best results.
Toning neutralizes unwanted brassy tones to reveal a cooler blonde or light brown shade. The trick is figuring out which color toner to use, where the choice is usually between blue and purple depending on your hair color. “Toning neutralizes unwanted brassy tones to reveal a cooler blonde or light brown shade.”
Since the toner your colorist applies is super-sheer, it can wear off quickly, leaving unwanted hues behind. That is, unless it's cared for properly. Second reason: “Because blonde hair tends to be more porous, it ends up discoloring over time,” De Souza says.
If you're blonde and you did a dark brown semi-permanent, don't expect to be blonde again in 12 washes." If your color does end up lasting longer than you hoped, Bishop says washing with Dawn dish soap could help strip the rest of the dye out. "But take into consideration your hair will feel quite dry after.
Ideally, permanent hair colour would stay just as vibrant as it was the day you coloured it, at least until the roots grow. On most heads of hair, that would mean a good 6-8 weeks between touch-ups.
A purple shampoo will not dye your hair but if you leave it on for too long you could find yourself with a little lilac staining. It's easy enough to get rid of – just wash your hair with a clarifying shampoo to reduce the tint!
Just as the purple pigments in purple shampoo neutralize brassy tones in blonde hair, the blue pigments in blue shampoo cancel out the unwanted orange, red, and copper tones that brunettes often battle—especially color-treated brunettes.
Should I Use Purple Conditioner Too? According to Kell and Brown, a purple conditioner will have the same effect as the shampoo, and using both may actually dry out your hair, Kell adds. Plus, purple shampoo will immediately tone your hair after a wash, so doubling purple hair products is unnecessary.
Because it does not contain an ingredient that will chemically change the color of your hair, purple shampoo cannot truly lighten hair. If anything, purple shampoo may make your hair temporarily slightly darker.
Purple shampoo is meant to only be used weekly or when your hair is looking brassy — not every day. Generally, you'll want to incorporate it into your hair care routine one to three times a week in place of your usual shampoo for color-treated hair.
Blue shampoos are designed to counteract orange tones in brunette hair, while purple shampoos are used to banish brass in blonde hair. If you make the leap from brunette to blonde hair, make sure to switch to a purple shampoo to counteract the yellow tones that often appear in color-treated blonde hair.
What ingredients should you avoid if you have color-treated hair? The most important part of caring for color-treated hair involves avoiding the following ingredients, as shared by pro colorist Richy Kandasamy: sulfates (SLS or SLES), parabens, sodium chloride, and petrochemicals.
Warm Blondes: Leave in for 1-3 minutes before rinsing.Neutral Blondes: Leave for 3-5 minutes before rinsing.Cool Blondes: Wait 5-15 minutes before rinsing.
Zoe's answer: Leaving purple shampoo in your hair for longer than the recommended time is not always a good idea. The longer you leave it, the more pigments will be deposited on your hair and they could even stain it permanently.
"Specifically, oestrogen, progesterone and cortisol can all play a part in the changes to hair colour – but oestrogen is the main factor in determining the higher content of melanins called eumelanin and pheomelanin in female hair.
Hair color is determined by the amount of a pigment called melanin in hair. An abundance of one type of melanin, called eumelanin, gives people black or brown hair. An abundance of another pigment, called pheomelanin, gives people red hair.
Brassy hair is caused by an overabundance of warm pigments in your hair, usually caused by bleaching and the hair coloring process. Brass usually shows up as yellow or orange tones in blonde hair and orange or red tones in brunette hair.
Heterochromia of the hair is described as the growth of hair with two distinct colours in the same person. When the distribution of the different-coloured hair is symmetric (e.g., lighter hair on the underarms, a red moustache on a person with otherwise brown hair), heterochromia of the hair is often physiologic.
Description. Waardenburg syndrome is a group of genetic conditions that can cause hearing loss and changes in coloring (pigmentation) of the hair, skin, and eyes.
A new study shows that stress really can give you gray hair. Researchers found that the body's fight-or-flight response plays a key role in turning hair gray. Your hair color is determined by pigment-producing cells called melanocytes.
According to the survey, the majority of men (42%) found blonde hair to be the most attractive. This was followed by brunette (36%), red (16%), black (5%), and gray (1%). ... Most Attractive Hair Colour According to Men.
Because blond hair tends to turn brown with age, natural blond hair is significantly less common in adulthood; according to the sociologist Christie Davies, only around five percent of adults in Europe and North America are naturally blond.
Also known as demi-permanent color, glaze or gloss, toning can correct the unwanted yellow, orange or even red tones lingering on your hair since it contains just enough pigment to improve your haircolor.
It is a combination of oombre and balayage, where transparent adhesive strip is used to color the hair or there is also different technique to achieve soft peek-a-boo highlights.
Dark hair is the most common hair color in the world. Although the United States is the land where they say blondes have more fun, there aren't very many of them here. The United States has predominantly black and brown hair in the population, with 85 percent for black hair and 11 percent for brown hair.
Introduction: My name is Twana Towne Ret, I am a famous, talented, joyous, perfect, powerful, inquisitive, lovely person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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