As salon closures swept the country [1] for three-plus months to stop the spread of COVID-19, people got . . . creative with their beauty upkeep — especially when it came to hair color. Boxed hair dye [2] and root touch-up kits began flying off virtual shelves [3], much to the dismay of pro stylists everywhere. Now, as customers slowly start trickling into salons yet again, colorists are seeing a common denominator in requests.
"Quarantine brought out the at-home hairstylist [4] in a lot of us," Michelle Cleveland [5], founder of New Jersey-based salon Hair Addict, told POPSUGAR. "The number one DIY hair color [6] we have had to correct has been a basic root touch-up [7]. While this may have seemed like an easy task to do at home, and it served its purpose during the time spent away from your salon, it came with a price."
It's not just the fixing of a bad root touch-up, however, but a very specific kind: "This past month that we have been reopen, the biggest color correction we are fixing is what we call in the industry 'banding [8].' This is when you accidentally apply the hair color on to your regrowth, or the root area, and inadvertently overlap it onto previously colored hair [9]. This creates a dark band that can definitely be seen by the naked eye and requires a bit of color removal to get back on track."
(And here you were thinking your stylist was just trying to scare you with those DIY-hair-dye horror stories.)