After being a bit of a drama queen and fretting that my newly touched up roots looked too dark (everyone convinced me they were not but alas, we always think what we want) I asked my hairdresser what I could do to my hair myself to blend my roots better as I could not afford to have professional colour just yet. She advised I just needed a few highlights to break the colour up and it would blend perfectly after a few more washes with my trusty silver shampoo. 

I thought 'I'll buy a highlight kit and get my mum to lovingly do a cap of highlights just around the roots'. My mum HATES doing caps and I could tell she really didn't want to do it so once I got back to my house, I took it upon myself to just paint some highlights in. I ended up bleaching all my roots and I had a horrific yellow aftermath to deal with however my roots were the correct level of lightness. I panicked a little and didn't know what to do as leaving silver shampoo on it for 10 minutes did nothing. I ran out to the shops with my boyfriend and picked up the Loreal Paris Prodigy hair dye 9.10 White Gold which is actually a gorgeous light blonde shade with a touch of ash to it. It fixed the botched job and got rid of quite a lot of the bleached look but even still my roots were a teeny bit yellow up to the rest of my toned hair. 

I was reading around on the net for some suggestions and came across Claire over at stylingo who had reviewed the La Riche Directions White Toner which looked like it did just the job of riding her of her yellow toned hair. (I picked up a pot of the toner which was typically sold out in the local hairdresser supply shop where it only costs £2.99 and I had to get it from Blue Banana at £5.00 but at least it's quite easy to get hold of .. and obviously popular!) 

The toner is simple to use, you simple wash your hair with a PH balanced shampoo (or something a little clarifying to remove any build up in your hair) towel dry and simply paint this stuff on with a tinting brush (you can get these from the pound shop or worst case over at Boots for around £1.69) I have bad memories of doing this when I used to use the Vermillion Red on my hair as this stuff used to get EVERYWHERE but as this is just a toner, it seems to be pretty much colourless on skin and is faint lilac in colour. The pot says to leave up to 15 minutes but as Claire did, I left it for more of around 30 mins. I find the problem with the time is that when I used to use the red colours, 15 minutes never was long enough but you also had to be careful not to leave it too long. The dyes contain no peroxide or anything and are mainly conditioning tints but they do deepen in colour (I found with the red) and considering this was going on bleached hair, the lilac could stain your hair cuticles. Just keep an eye on it as you go and you should be fine. Around the 30 minute mark I washed the toner off and got a tad worried that nothing actually looked any different. 

Before using the La Riche Directions White Toner

Now there is a slight difference, although not sure if you'll see but the overall tone is better. The roots are still a tad warm but blend a lot better now with the bottom half of my hair colour. It has also got rid of the darker ash tone of the ends of my hair and blended the colour really well. I will probably give this another go but just on the roots this time and maybe leave for another 15-30 minutes and report back. This is obviously in artificial light and there may be a difference in day light. Overall, the toner has given my hair a lovely brighten tone and the conditioning benefits are also really good. I'd say this is probably around a 7/10 as I can see the colour difference more than is showing in photographs. For the price of £5.00, I'll easily get another use out of this as I used just over half the tub so money wise it's great value.