Light Spring hair color: your levels, and what to ask for

Can a Light Spring be blonde, or brown?

Half of this question answers itself. Spring and light both sound like blonde, and the palette obliges - it names a shade at every rung from level 10 down. So almost nobody arrives here asking whether blonde is allowed. What people actually argue about, on every forum where this season comes up, is the other end: whether a brunette can be a Light Spring at all, and how much depth the coloring will carry. Both answers are below, and they have different shapes.

Going up, from a level 6 natural - a warm dark blonde, and the deepest shade this palette names. Every frame stays golden; the only thing moving is how light it goes.

• Her natural, L6 Hazelnut. The floor of the palette, worn as somebody’s actual hair.
• Two levels up, L8 Honey. Comfortably inside the rule, and inside the palette.
• Her ceiling, L9 Three levels up and still carrying gold. As far as the distance rule goes.
• Past it, bleached Four levels, and toned out. Level 10 is on your palette - this is not level 10, this is what is left once the gold has gone.

And the other direction, from a level 8 natural. Same palette, same gold, and a much shorter road - the floor sits closer to her than the ceiling did to the woman above.

• Her natural, L8 Where a great many Light Springs already sit without doing anything.
• One level down, L7 Light golden brown. More depth, and none of it bought with coolness.
• Her floor, L6 Golden chestnut. Two levels down, and the deepest this palette goes.
• Past it, dark chocolate Five levels down, and the hair has become the only strong thing in the picture.

Look at the first frame of the top row and the third frame of the bottom one. Level 6 is the same color in both - the same golden chestnut, the same tube. For one woman it is the hair she grew. For the other it is the far edge of what she can ask for. A level is not a verdict; it is a distance from wherever you happen to start.

Notice what does not change as either row moves. Every frame that works is warm - nobody drifts toward ash at any level, in either direction. And the two frames that fail do not fail because of a number. The bleached one fails because there is no pigment left to be golden with; the chocolate one fails because it puts a hard dark edge on a face that has nothing to answer it with.

That second one is what low contrast means in practice. Your skin, your eyes and your brows all sit within a few steps of each other, and hair is the only one of the four you can move. Move it far enough and it stops belonging to the set: the eye goes to the hair, and the face behind it turns into background.

So can a brunette be a Light Spring?

1. 1 Yes - if the brown is golden

   This is the argument you will find wherever the season comes up, and the answer is not about depth. Temperature and clarity decide this season; darkness does not. A warm golden brown at level 5 belongs here. An ashy mid brown at level 7 does not - and it is the ash that rules it out, never the number in front of it.

   Golden brown, warm - rather than mousy or ashy.
2. 2 And your hair may simply have changed

   A great many Light Springs were near-white blonde as children and settle into a light golden brown as adults. The palette did not move; the hair did. Hair is one sign among several, and the season is decided by the whole set - warm undertone, light clear eyes, low contrast - rather than by the sign that happens to be easiest to see in a mirror.

   Judge it by whether these shades leave you looking rested.
3. 3 Depth is relative to your skin, not to a chart

   On deeper skin the whole set moves down together. A Light Spring with deep golden-brown skin carries hair that stays close to her own skin in depth - a warm golden brown rather than anything near black - and she is exactly as much a Light Spring as the level 8 in the second row. You will meet her in the next two sections.

   Close to your skin in depth, and warm in tone.

So the band has two edges and they are not the same kind of thing. Going up there is a distance limit - about three levels from wherever you start - while the palette itself does not run out until level 10. Going down there is a hard floor at level 6, and it applies whoever you are. Which makes the next question, the one about red, a question about levels as well.

Red, and how far you can take it

Most seasons have to be careful about red. This one does not, particularly - your palette publishes two of them outright and neither is a compromise. What this coloring will not carry is a lot of red, and the line between the two turns out to be narrower, and far more measurable, than anyone usually admits.

Four shades on one woman, running from very little color to a great deal of it. The first two are on your palette. The second two are on its avoid list.

• Rose-gold, L8 The quietest red here, and the easiest of them. Peach, rather than pigment.
• Strawberry, L8 The one your palette names. Plainly more color - and it still reads blonde before it reads red.
• Copper The color arrives in the room before she does.
• Mahogany Dark, and cool with it. Her eyes have gone quiet behind it.

And the same four shades in the same order, on a deeper warm complexion. Watch where the row turns - it is the same frame.

• Rose-gold, L8 Barely a color at all, and it sits on her skin like light.
• Strawberry, L8 Warmer and rosier against a deeper complexion, and still hers.
• Copper Loud here too - the orange arrives first and her face follows it.
• Mahogany Dark and cool, and her skin has gone flat underneath it.

Here is the whole rule, and it comes off your own palette page rather than out of anybody’s opinion. Copper and light golden chestnut are the same color except for one thing. The same hue - 28 and 29 on the wheel. The same lightness - 41 per cent, both of them. One is a shade the palette tells you to wear; the other sits on its avoid list two blocks further down the same page. What separates them is chroma - how much color is loaded into that lightness - and copper carries nearly twice as much of it. Red is not the problem on this coloring. Quantity is.

Two complexions, the same four shades, the same order - and the row turns at the same frame in both. That is worth saying out loud, because the question above it behaved differently. The blonde ceiling moves with the reader, because it is measured from her own natural depth. Chroma is not measured from anything about her; it is a property of what is in the tube. So this answer does not travel, and the door shuts in the same place wherever you are standing.

Mahogany fails for a second reason on top of the first, and the two are worth keeping apart. Copper is too much of the right color. Mahogany is the wrong one: measured off the palette page it sits at hue 356, on the cool side of red, while every other shade in this section lives between 20 and 39. It is the only frame here that is not warm at all, and it is the one where the face stops looking lit from inside.

So red is open to you - at the top of the scale, and in the quantity your palette actually publishes. Which leaves the one change nobody chooses. It arrives on its own schedule, and it arrives cool.

Going gray on purpose

Two things arrive at once here, and it helps to keep them apart. Gray comes in cool, and cool is the one direction your palette has no shade in at all. But gray also comes in light - and light is exactly where your hair already lives. So the thing that wrecks this change for most seasons, the sudden jump in contrast, largely does not apply to you.

Four decisions rather than four shades, on a fair warm complexion whose natural level 6 has gone substantially silver.

• Covered It works, and it is the most expensive of the four - a hard line at the parting every four weeks, for as long as you keep choosing it.
• Blended Warm babylights through the silver. Gold stays beside her face, and the silver stops being the only thing happening.
• Growing it out Four months in. The band is a change of temperature as much as of depth, which is why growing out reads more gently here than it does on a dark head.
• Full silver The value is fine - she was light to start with. What has left the picture is the warmth, and with it the lit-from-inside quality her skin had two frames ago.

The same four decisions on a deeper warm complexion with a natural level 4. Three of them behave the same way. The fourth does not.

• Covered The same trade as above: it looks right the day it is done, and it has a standing appointment attached to it.
• Blended Arguably the best result anywhere in this section. The gold does the work - it bridges the silver and her skin, so the silver arrives as part of something rather than as a jump.
• Growing it out The same four months, and a plainer band than the first row had - there is simply more distance for it to cross.
• Full silver The widest gap on this page between hair and skin. Striking, and it looks entirely deliberate - but it is the one choice here that stops being low-contrast.

Compare the last frame of each row. The same decision does two different things. In the first row the silver sits inside the value range her hair already occupied, so what she loses is warmth - the face is still evenly lit, just less warmly. In the second it is the brightest thing in the picture by some distance, and what she gains is contrast. Neither one is a mistake. But they are not the same outcome, and advice that treats them as one was written for somebody else.

It is worth answering the question sitting underneath this one, because the usual advice has it backwards. Going lighter is not what reads as younger on this coloring. Staying warm is. Skin loses warmth as it ages, and that is most of what people are reacting to when they say a face looks tired - so hair is the one thing near it that you can still put warmth back into. A cool ashy blonde, chosen to blend the gray away, removes the last of it. A soft golden blend puts it back, and it is the cheaper of the two by a wide margin.

One more thing, and here this coloring gets an unusual break. Silver has no pigment left to defend itself, so it picks up warmth from hard water, from sun and from a hot dryer far faster than colored hair does - which on most seasons is a fault to be corrected. On this one a faint champagne cast is closer to right than the blue-violet correction would be. What you have to manage is evenness rather than warmth, which makes you the one reader on this site who should go carefully with a purple shampoo.

So going gray turns out to be a question about gold rather than a question about gray, and the answer is to keep some of it. Which leaves the part nobody enjoys - what happens to all of this between appointments.

Keeping it, between appointments

Everything above this ends at the salon door. What follows is the eight weeks on the other side of it, which is where most of the disappointment on this subject actually happens - and where the diagnosis is almost always wrong.

One woman, one appointment, four points across ten weeks, photographed close enough that the color is the only thing in the frame. Every frame is the same level 9. Lay a strand from the last one beside a strand from the first and they match for depth - which is the part to hold on to, because it is not what the row looks like it is doing.

• Day one The morning it was done. Several golden values at once, and the light coming back off it.
• Three weeks The values are collapsing toward one. Most people notice this in a photograph before they notice it in the mirror.
• Six weeks Straw. One value, matt surface - and not a shade lighter than day one.
• Ten weeks Bare. It has not gone ash - there is no blue in it anywhere. What is left is the raw pale yellow the lift exposed, with the gold gone from on top of it.

That distinction is what the whole section turns on. Brassy is not warmer. It is barer. Nothing was added to your hair over those ten weeks - something left it - so an aisle full of purple, which exists to remove yellow, is pointed at the wrong end of the problem. Take the yellow out of hair that has already lost its gold and you arrive at the one thing this coloring cannot carry: a flat greige with no warmth anywhere near the face.

The warm pigment under a lifted blonde is not an accident of the dye - it is what was there all along. Hair carries two pigments, a dark brown-black one and a reddish-brown one, and lifting removes the first far faster than the second. That is why every blonde on earth goes yellow on the way up, and it is why your raw base, once the gloss has gone, is a color that is nearly right and simply has nothing in it.

It is also why the fix at the next appointment is not a lighter shade. Lift further and you expose more of the same raw yellow that was going flat in the first place, so you have bought a shorter road to the same week six. The appointment worth booking is a gloss, not a lift.

Four things that hold it, and one of them is free

1. 1 Check the bottle

   A color-depositing conditioner once a week, in a gold or champagne bottle. This is the card most people get backwards, and the shelf is not helping: the blonde aisle is mostly purple, because most blondes are trying to cancel yellow. You are trying to keep it. Look at the color of the product itself before it goes anywhere near your head - it wants to be the color you want the hair to be.

   Gold or champagne on the tube, and check by looking at it.
2. 2 Cooler water

   Heat opens the cuticle and the deposit leaves through it. A cool last rinse costs nothing and does more than most of what you can buy. If your water is hard, a shower filter is the second thing worth having - minerals settle on the cuticle and gray the gold out faster than the washing does.

   A cool final rinse, and a filter if your water is hard.
3. 3 Heat off the ends

   A dryer and a straightener oxidize whatever color is left, and the ends have been through every wash since the appointment - they are the porous part, so they go first and they go furthest. Lower setting, a protectant, and point the heat at the roots rather than down the length.

   Lower setting, protectant, and start at the roots.
4. 4 A gloss at week five

   A demi-permanent gloss in gold puts the depth back without lifting anything, which is why it costs a fraction of a color and does no damage on the way in. Booked at week five it is a top-up. Booked at week ten it is a rescue, and it is priced like one.

   A gold gloss, booked before you think you need it.

All of which is the easy version - keeping something that is already right. The harder page is the one you open when it has gone wrong, and on this coloring it goes wrong in two quite different ways, with eight shades between them doing most of the damage.