Warning: Spent 2 extra hours fixing a toner that didn't need fixing

Last Thursday I had a client with stubborn brassy tones, so I mixed a purple toner and applied it. After 45 minutes, it looked okay but not perfect, so I left it on another 20 minutes. Big mistake. Her ends turned lavender and I had to spend 2 hours doing a color correction with a warm gloss to fix it. Turns out the brassiness was from hard water buildup, not a toner issue. I should have clarified her hair first, and I'd have saved myself all that time. Has anyone else run into a situation where they treated the wrong problem and it cost them a whole afternoon?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant_torres13h ago

Oof, that's a rough lesson to learn (and an expensive one in terms of time). I've definitely done the whole "treat the symptom, not the cause" thing before myself, like when I spent an hour deep conditioning hair that turned out to just be coated in hard water minerals. It's frustrating when you're so sure of the fix and it backfires that hard, especially with a client watching the whole thing.

ray2104h ago

The deep conditioning on hard water minerals" really got me, haha. I once spent a whole afternoon trying to fix a scratch on a guitar finish with polish, only to realize it was just a cloudy spot from a cleaner build-up.