Do Natural Hair Dyes Really Work?

By Rigel Celeste on March 29th, 2009

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Whether it’s highlights, covering grays, or going all-over platinum blonde, statistics show that more than half of us women use hair coloring products in some form or fashion. And although “going green” is a big trend, you don’t have to be a treehugger to want less chemicals in your life and to be curious about more natural hair coloring techniques (there are plenty of health reasons too). So the question begs, do natural hair dyes really work?

The answer is yes and no. Few natural products do the coloring job as wonderfully as their full-fledged all-artificial chemical counterparts do, but there are options out there that many women like. Unfortunately the only completely 100% natural hair color is henna, which isn’t always reliable, so the next best choice would be any number of the vegetable-based brands. Although most of them do contain some chemicals (i.e. peroxide is still necessary for lightening) it’s substantially less than traditional coloring products. According to this review by Natural Solutions magazine the brands Herbatint and Naturcolor work pretty well.

I personally hate chemicals and like to go natural whenever I can in life, but I have yet to take my earth-and-health-friendly efforts as far as my highlighting routine. I guess I’ll have to work on that.

(Photo courtesy of Vincent Boiteau on Flickr)