Rant: My toner disaster last Tuesday took 3 hours to fix, salon was staring at me

So I had this client come in for a simple gloss, nothing crazy. I mixed up a toner shade I've used a hundred times, but this batch came out looking like a bruised eggplant. I mean purple gray in some spots, almost green in others. My chair faces the lobby, so everyone saw me panicking. I had to strip it, rebalance the porosity, and layer a warm toner back in. Three whole hours for what should have been a 45 minute service. The client was cool about it but I felt awful. Anyone else had a toner or color correction spiral that just wrecked their whole schedule for the day?

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kellymurphy2d ago

The purple gray with green spots is exactly the kind of thing that makes you want to crawl under the chair and hide. I've been there twice in the last month alone, and it always hits when the salon is packed. But here's what I keep coming back to: did you test the toner on a small strand first, or did you just trust the batch like I usually do? Cause I never learn my lesson with that either. The porosity thing is the real kicker though, cause that client's hair probably needed a protein balance before you even touched the toner. Do you think the issue was the product itself or did something about her hair that day just throw the whole thing off track?