People arrive apologizing. They shouldn’t. Almost every correction I take began as a reasonable decision made with incomplete information: a box on a Sunday night, a stylist in another city working from a photo instead of the hair in front of her.
What I need isn’t an apology. It’s the history. Color is a record of everything ever put on the hair, and I read that record before I decide anything.
What counts as a correction
A correction is any appointment where the job is undoing color rather than adding it. Bands of dense pigment from years of at-home root touch-ups. Ends lightened so often they’ve gone porous and orange. A black that needs to be blonde. Gray coverage that has stopped looking like hair and started looking like paint.
What isn’t a correction: your regular full highlight, a gloss refresh, two levels darker in one process. Those are maintenance, they’re on the menu, and you can book them without talking to anyone.
Why the quote comes after the consultation
Two people can walk in with hair the same length and the same shade and need entirely different days from us. What sets the price isn’t the color you have. It’s how many layers sit under it, how old they are, how porous the hair is, and how far it has to travel to reach the photo on your phone. None of that shows up in a text message.
Booking two hours for a job that needs six doesn’t just rush your hair. It costs the two people booked behind you their appointments.
So the consultation runs thirty to forty minutes, it’s complimentary, and it ends with a written estimate: sessions, hours, a range rather than a single number, and what it will cost to keep. Corrective color is billed at $125 an hour with a two-hour minimum. A $75 deposit holds the first session and comes off the total.
Two sessions, sometimes three
Lightener has a ceiling on any given day. Push past it and you trade the color you wanted for hair that won’t hold a curl and stretches when it’s wet. So I work to a level, stop, and put you back together with a filler or gloss. You leave looking deliberate, not halfway.
Sessions sit four to six weeks apart. The gap lets the cuticle settle and lets me see how the hair behaved before I ask more of it. Between them you’re in a real, wearable color. Not a holding pattern.
Box dye
Box color isn’t weaker than salon color. It’s less predictable, which is worse. Formulated for the widest possible range of hair, it carries a high developer and heavy direct dye, and deposits unevenly on hair that wasn’t uniform to begin with. Ten years of root touch-ups leaves a stacked band through the mid-lengths that lifts at a completely different rate from the hair above and below it.
Black box color is the one that surprises people. Most of it is built on a blue or green base, so lifting it doesn’t reveal brown. It reveals teal, then mud. One request: don’t try to fix it before you see us. The most expensive corrections I take all started with a second box.
Henna and metallic salts
Tell me if you have ever used henna. Even once. Even years ago. Even if the label said vegetable dye.
Body-art-quality henna mostly blocks lightener and makes color unpredictable. Compound henna (cut with metallic salts, common in imported and drugstore boxes) reacts with peroxide, and in a bowl it can heat, steam and melt the strand outright. It’s the one thing here that can end an appointment before it starts.
So every corrective consultation includes a free strand test: a small cutting, twenty-volume developer and water, twenty minutes, watched. Bubbling, heat or a color shift tells us what we need while it’s still a half-inch of hair on a paper towel.
Also worth mentioning
- Color-depositing masks and conditioners. Direct dye builds up in the cuticle and lifts in patches.
- Any keratin or smoothing service in the last six months.
- Daily purple shampoo. It stains porous ends a violet-gray that reads as a toning problem when it isn’t one.
What to bring to the consultation
- Your hair
- Unwashed a day or two, not straightened. Come as it usually is.
- Photos
- Three or four of where you want to go. Daylight, more than one angle.
- The list
- Everything applied in the last eighteen months: box, gloss, toner, henna, smoothing, at-home lightener.
- Your calendar
- A wedding in nine weeks changes the plan. Say so at the start.
- A real number
- What you can spend, and how often you can come back.
You don’t need to arrive with the answer. You need to be in the chair while we find it.
Bring us the whole story.
Upload a few photos, tell us what’s been on your hair, and we’ll come back with a plan, a session count and a range, before you ever sit down.