I’ve talked about natural hair color on the blog before so I was eager to try this product. It’s from a company called ACT (Advanced Cosmetic Technologies). Their website is http://www.ActNaturals.com.
Unfortunately, I can’t give this product a glowing review.
I was excited about using an all natural, vegetable based dye to (hopefully) cover the grey roots that have been growing since my pregnancy began, but it didn’t do that so well.
To be fair, grey hair is notoriously resistant to color and even conventional semi and demi permanent hair colors often don’t color it sufficiently. It may just not be possible to color grey without chemicals.
If you search the internet you’ll find some really horrible reviews of this product. My thoughts are far less extreme either way so I’ll do a quick list of pros and cons:
PROS:
- The product is a natural, vegetable based dye and therefore has no PPD (short for paraphenylene-diamine, which I mention here in another article about natural hair dye). It also contains no ammonia or peroxide (so it cannot lighten, only darken your current hair color).
- It has a fresh, pleasant smell. When my oldest son walked in the room he said “something smells like cherries”.
CONS:
- The product was a little more complicated to apply. It’s a two step process and also requires the application of heat (basically you use a blow dryer to apply heat for 5 minutes on, 5 minutes off until you rinse). That wasn’t a super big deal, but the product is a little runny so it’s hard to keep it off your scalp, which leads to the second problem.
- The dye was very difficult to rinse off. I rinsed my hair 3 times but it still felt a little “muddy” with the product. Even now after several shampoos, dye comes off on my hands if I run them through my hair. The included “stain guard” did effectively remove stains from the sink at least.
That last issue is evidently par for the course for vegetable dyes. In fact today I got my hair cut and explained to the hair dresser what was happening. She said that was typical. “We use vegetable dyes here all the time and that’s just what they do, the pigments are just really strong.”
My hair doesn’t feel at all damaged or dried out. It feels soft and looks shiny so I’m pretty confident it wasn’t harmed by the process.
My final take?
I would recommend this product for people who have medium to dark hair (that is more forgiving of color mishaps) and wanted to go a bit darker, but not if I had grey hair I wanted to color.
