why you should break up with your purple shampoo

It’s the age old question: which purple shampoo would be best for maintaining my salon blonde hair color? The answer? Maybe none of them.

Long lauded as the miracle solution for brightening blonde highlights and making salon color last longer, the truth is your purple shampoo could be compromising the salon color you just paid up for.

The reality of purple shampoo is it is depositing cool pigments into your hair, much like temporary at-home hair color. These pigments neutralize warm, golden tones in your hair—tones that reflect light and make hair look lighter and healthier. Those cool tones will absorb light and can cause hair to look dark, dull, and brittle. Even worse, if you’re using highlights to blend your gray, a solution we frequently recommend, your purple shampoo is probably brightening your gray at the same time it’s toning down your blonde, leaving you wondering why your hair shows gray much faster than it used to.

Which brings us to a talking point in favor of purple shampoo: if you have virgin gray hair that tends to yellow from heat and other environmental factors, it could be the right solution for you—when used as needed, and as a color treatment, of course. Use as a regular shampoo could lead to excess deposit of pigment making gray hair look dull or even—imagine this—purple.

For those of you left wondering what to do now, here are some alternatives to the forbidden purple goo: Consider talking with your stylist about switching to a color formula that better fits your needs, or a highlight placement that works better with your maintenance schedule. In-salon glossing treatments can work wonders and leave the coloring where it belongs—in the hands of your stylist.