Vitamin C to Remove Hair Color, does it work?

Recently I was going from Purple to Teal with my hair color, and I didn't want to use bleach, and my favorite color remover from Sally's was out of stock. I had been told a bunch of times to try this kind of odd way to remove hair color, it wasn't the fastest, and you needed to do it a few times, but I was told it works and leaves no damage on your hair. I had just ordered my dye online so I had about a week to wait, and figured, why not? If it doesn't work then its not harm to my hair, and what I needed only cost me about $7 dollars. and it would make a neat blog post about if this really worked or not. So here it is, my experience using Vitamin C to remove my hair color!

Before I get started I will say I use Pravana vivids dye which is pretty hard to remove from your hair, once its there, its there for awhile. So I wasn't expecting this to remove my color in one go, but here is what I used:

1. Vitaman C Tablets (1000mg). You can also use powder, but I couldn't find any. I put mine in my magic bullet and turned it to powder, which made it easy to mix. You can also crush it by hand if you need to.

2. Head and Shoulders Shampoo.

Now I am not 100% sure how it works. I have read diffrent places that the vitamin C opens up your hair to remove more color and the head and shoulders strips the color from your hair. I know the head and shoulders part is true because I have used it alone to help  fade my hair faster, the Vitamin C just sort of boots it up to help remove the color.

How I did it:

I've seen in videos and blog posts people use only a few tablets and really didn't see a lot of results, in others I seen people use spoonfulls to make a paste. and I felt that way was the way I was going to go. So thats what I did. It may vary depending on your hair thickness and length but I started off with a table spoon of powder and mixed it with a equal amount of shampoo until it became a paste, added it to my hair like I would a bleach or a dye, and mixed more as I needed (just so I wouldn't waste the powder). It took about 3 mixes to cover my whole head. I also damped my hair before hand to help the shampoo. Once I was done I sort of scrubbed my hair with the mixture in it, and put a shower cap on, let it sit for about 30-45 minutes then took a shower to wash it out. Before I washed it out when in the shower I made sure to scrub my hair reall well, you could see the dye come out from my hair as i did this. I rinsed in warm water (which also helps remove dye).

The first time I saw a little difference, I knew it would take a few more times so I did it twice in a week, the same way each time and this was the results:

Each time I kept losing more and more of the purple, It seemed to pull the dye from my hair quicker than using just the head and shoulders (which I found I had to use for about 2 weeks alone). With pravana that is a strong staining dye this is pretty good. I like how it came out with out hurting my hair, but there are some pros and cons to this method. 

- It does remove the color, but it also takes time. If you need a quick fix this may not be the right thing to do.

-  Even though it doesn't hurt your hair, it does leave it sort of dry for the first week so you will need to use a good moisturizing mask. 

- It also leaves the hair feeling "gummy" right after its done, it goes away once the hair is dry, but it just feels odd at first. 

- Though it removes the color, it sort of leaves it patchy, do you may need to go in and remove just some areas if the color is still strongly there.

My advice though is wash up all the pills at once or buy powder, and add as much as you can to the shampoo, that helps remove the color, only doing two or three pills isn't enough to strip the color from your hair. 

End result it, yes it works, but you need the time to do this. Most days I don't plan ahead on my hair color, I just kind of do it. But if you want a safe way to remove color and don't mind waiting, this could work for you. 

Hope this helped you out! thanks for reading!