Vitamin C Hair Color Remover

The bomb! I've used on crazy semi colors and permanent natural hued shades alike. It ALWAYS at least lightens and sometimes removes. I take a handful of 500mg plain cheap C tabs and crush them in a plastic bag with a rolling pin. Hey it works. Then I mix with dandruff and clarifying shampoos,in a bowl with a brush, to form a paste - put on hair I dampened w hot water, massage in really well, and let sit up to an hour but usually less in a cap and beanie or turban. I don't even try too too hard to crush there are always chunks. My hair usually feels squeaky clean afterwards but shiny; common sense tells me to use a nice conditioner after. Most recently I used downtown brown by feria and it looked awful dark, so I did this knowing it lightened underneath and sure enough, light brown hair!

This worked so well it's like a magic trick... I have been growing out a reddish blonde hair color for several months, and was getting dark roots. (My natural hair color is dark blonde.) So I went to the salon, where my stylist said she would give me low lights to blend in the growing out part and an all-over warm tone. Instead I ended up with a deep mahogany, much too dark for my coloring.

I hit the internet to see what I could do without going back to the salon/spending a lot of money, or damaging my hair, and came across the Vitamin C cure. There are many variations, but here's what I did:

Crushed 20 Vitamin C tablets (1000 mg) in a plastic bag with a rolling pin. The bag developed a couple of small holes, so I slipped a sheet of foil underneath to catch all the powder. I put the powder in a hair coloring mixing bowl.
Squirted in a bunch of Head & Shoulders original formula shampoo.
Mixed it all up and glopped it onto my head, covering all of my hair thoroughly. (I wet my hair in the sink and towel dried it a bit before applying goop.)
Put on a shower cap and wrapped my head in a towel and waited 60 minutes.
Rinsed it out thoroughly in the shower, washed with a clarifying shampoo, then deep conditioned (Ion Clarifying shampoo and Ion Repair Solutions conditioner).

And incredibly, my hair was about three shades lighter and a perfect coppery blonde. Soft and fragrant too. Some people have said they did not have any luck with this treatment, but if that is the case, I think they didn't use enough Vitamin C or let it sit long enough. Worked like a charm for me!

So...this works. I should specify...it works on semi/demi permanent color. I've been coloring or bleaching or highlighting my hair for so long I got curious about what the natural color actually is. I had been dying it black at home with various high end salon brand demi-permanent color for about two years now. A male friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a while said "ooh I like the black hair. It looks really slutty". Which I took as a compliment, obviously. That was months ago. But about a week ago I was at a Sunday brunch with a few women who had dyed black hair and I thought...you know what? That doesn't look great. They looked great but the hair not so much. Ok one of them looked terrible. So terrible in fact that I am now back to my natural color. After applying a mix of basic shampoo and powdered C to dry hair; ends for an hour, roots for an additional half hour. So 90 minutes total, the color was visibly lifted. It definitely left my hair a bit dryer, or "courser" but conditioner smoothed it out nicely and actually the c treatment gave my fine strands some decent body.

Turns out my hair is dark brown. But probably not for long.

Just tried the Vitamin C to lighten my dyed hair. I used L-ascorbic acid powder I had laying around for making serums. I mixed with some cheap shampoo and brushed on with a coloring brush. I covered my hair and kept checking it. I couldn't see anything happening.
After an hour, I thoroughly rinsed my hair. While I was rinsing, I didn't see any color coming out of my hair either. However, after I was done, I was pleasantly surprised to see my hair had lightened. I am now immediately deep conditioning my hair just as a precaution.

I will definitely do again if I think it still needs to be lighter. Just so happy to say that it does work.

I have LONG dark brown hair so I used 50 500mg Vitimin C tabs. Use a spice grinder to c powder the Vit.c. When applied, it was itchy!! After I stopped scratching a bit, it stopped itching. Made my skin a bit red dry and itchy.  I let it sit for about 52 min under a shower cap. Rinsed with very warm water then applied a deep conditioning hair mask. I used extra virgin coconut oil, raw, wild honey and 1 raw egg.  Back under a shower cap and needed a towel around my neck since it dripped all over the place.   I Let it sit for 23 min then showered with normal shampoo and conditioner.  Then I put in some smoothing cream and de frizz serum and blow dried on medium then hot heat till dried. Then blew it all out cold.  My hair felt very heavy and oily but I'm okay with that.  I think it needs to sit in oil for a couple days to recover.  I didn't notice a big huge difference.  I tried to color my hair as close as possible to my natural color and I have  a dark brown hair.  My hair has A Lot of "highlights" because I was trying to get the color out of all the grey I have.  It didn't take all the color out but everything else is a shade lighter.

Omg!! I wish I'd known about this trick a year ago!! My hair had a very bad year last year with 3 perms and a couple boxed and salon dyes causing me to lose about half of my hair volume from root shock causing it to fall out due to too many chemical treatments on very fine and already thinking hair. So about 6 or 7 months ago I decided I was going to call it quits and let it grow out and that I'd rather have limp, medium ashy brown hair (my natural color) than have permed hair that was multiple colors of red and brown so I let it grow out for about 7 months and about 2 weeks ago in a moment of temporary Insanity decided I was going to try to dye it a garnet red codor again in hopes my healthy grow out had a better chance for holding the dye.... it did, for about 2 days and then over the last couple weeks it has just gotten a more horrid color each day and is starting to fall out in clumps again. Desperate for a color correction that I could actually afford and that would hopefully not kill my hair even more, I read reviews on color oops and decided it was too risky but happened to see an ad for this thread, so I read the reviews, got my vitamin c and this morning about 2 hours ago I started my journey. I crushed up probably 30 500mg tablets with baby shampoo until it made a semi thick paste, you don't need to apply it as 100% thoroughly as hair dye, and then I spread it on and threw on a shower cap. I set a 30 min timer and sat down to watch TV. I checked at 30 mins and it still seemed red so I sat another 30. When I took my cap off I was convinced that it had worked probably 30% so I was apprehensive but I got in the shower, used my Nioxin shampoo and conditioner and then used a deep conditioner treatment, I lost about 32 hairs, yes I counted because I don't have many left, so idk if that was from the treatment or still damage from the red dye but my hair did seem to feel softer when I washed out the vitamin c mix so who knows. I could tell IMMEDIATELY looking in the mirror that it had worked. I have blow dried now and it's almost a "nice" honey/lighter brown color and while I'm not IN LOVE with it I love it 100% more than I did the crappy reddish brown/orange it was 3 hours ago. Like I said at the beginning, I wish I'd known this trick a year ago because I'd probably have the same color hair I do today but I would most likely still have no major bald spots because I ended up losing 50-75% of my hair. Moral of the story.... don't be so vain ladies, we usually end up doing ourselves more harm than good :(

TLDR: YES THIS WORKS!! Use about 30 500mg tablets with baby shampoo and leave it on about an hour after making a paste with finely crushed tablets, or buy vitamin c powder, and adding shampoo a little at a time. The longer you leave it the lighter it gets it seems.

I have used vitamin c tablets to remove dark box dye color from my hair several times. I can't speak about the science of this or whether it would work for all hair types, but it works great for my fine, naturally ash blonde hair. I crush up about thirty chewable tablets, ideally with a mortar and pestle but you can also place them in a ziploc bag and use a rolling pin, into a very fine powder. Then, mix in enough shampoo to make enough paste to coat your hair. I use a simple clarifying shampoo myself, and really saturate the roots and strands. Then, pop on a shower cap and let it sit for two or three hours. Then rinse well, and apply plenty of conditioner as it is a drying treatment. I don't find this damages my hair at all though. In my limited experience, this has been a very simple and easy trick to remove home dye disasters without the risk of damage and irritation that bleach can have. If you dyed your hair too dark accidentally, definitely give this a try because it may be able to remove your color without the dreaded bleach bath.

I've had my fair share of home box dye nightmares and swore that I would never box dye again. Fast forward to the present: my naturally medium warm brown hair was highlighted to a beautiful natural soft blonde at the beginning of the summer by my insanely talented (and also wildly expensive) hairstylist. Cold weather + impending winter had me feeling like I wanted to go darker, but my bank account had me feeling like that wasn't a possibility at the time. I decided to go for it and do a semi permanent medium neutral brown. The highlights my hairdresser put in were toned cooler to counter the warm, gingery undertones of my natural brown. So I figured my best bet was neutral, it wouldn't turn green over the highlights and it wouldn't look orange.
Well...it looked alright at first. Way darker than I wanted, but alright. Then it started to fade a bit after the first shampoo. When that happened the highlights started to show through with an unfortunate ashy gray tone to them. I wanted it all gone, or at least washed out enough that the highlights wouldn't be gray. Being that I didn't have the money for a professional job, I looked online for other solutions and saw the rave reviews for Vitamin C. I bought a bottle of plain tablets and the journey began.
First of all you have to crush the tablets REALLY REALLY well. They should be a fine powder: think confectioners sugar. Anything bigger and they won't make a paste. This is a process, I did each one by hand with a spoon. I crushed probably about 30 tablets and I probably could've used more. I mixed them with some baby shampoo, which I've been told fades color, until it was a thick paste, applied it to my hair and sat for an hour with a shower cap on my head. Washed it out (twice) with more baby shampoo and deep conditioned it. Dried, styled, etc. My hair is probably about a shade lighter and the highlights are showing through as noticeably more gold than before. My whole head is a nice warm medium brown, much like my natural color. I'll have to see the highlights under the fluorescent lights at the gym or at work to see how they look, but as of right now I'm pleased. No noticeable damage to my hair; it actually feels quite soft and smells like my conditioner. Knocked off one lipstick because it didn't do as much as I hoped, it wasn't back to it's initial light brown/dark blonde color, but it was much better. I may do it again in a day or two and update after that, but for now I'm calling it a success!

TL/DR natural med. brown highlighted to soft light brown/dark blonde, box died over w/ neutral dark brown left it too dark & grayish toned. vitamin c+baby shampoo paste for one hour= warm medium brown w/ gold toned highlights. Good luck, everyone!

Thisl recipe is a god-send. Earlier today, I used box dye to try to achieve a light chestnut brown. My hair came out yellow and my grays looked white! I paniced and tried to cover with clairol's medium golden brown. My hair turned cherry red! I didn't know what to do. I would have been too embarrased to go to my salon looking like this. Well google and makeupalley to the rescue. I tried this vitamin c color removal recipe and now my hair is a very light chestnut/golden brown. It actually looks nice. Crisis averted.

Do you believe in miracles?

I am currently working on removing YEARS of red dye (and some henna, too) from my BSL hair. I am probably a level 6.5 lightish red. My now-natural hair color is salt and pepper, with white strands, not grey, and my goal is to go to a silvery ash blonde and then stop coloring all together as that blends out. For some reason my reddish-brown hair turns black immediately before turning white. Odd. But this is only where my tale begins...

I am attempting to move cautiously forward and damage my hair as little as possible. I never heat style and I use Olaplex and coconut oil regularly, so my hair is pretty healthy despite regular dying. It is fine, so not very strong and it can't really handle heat styling routinely.

I started last weekend with a bleach bath over coconut oil using 20 vol, which left me with very ugly orangish hair. I am not a hair snob, and have had (and loved) all shades of red and orange in the past, but there is something particularly unattractive abut the orange that results from bleach. It kind of has highlighter yellow tones to it. Yuck. I was super tempted to just redye it red, but convinced myself to power through and I can always redye in a few weeks. Baby steps. My hair still seemed healthy; I used lots of Olaplex and deep conditioners during and after the process.

This morning I realized that I might benefit from a color remover. Yes, I should have done this before the first bleach bath but... I didn't. I rinsed for 20 minutes in the sink (1 round of 15 minutes and another of 5, both seemed like an eternity) and then jumped in the shower to deep condition. I could see that my hair was still highlighter orange with lots of yellow But it looked like some of the additional red pigments were gone, so probably worth it.

While in the shower I spotted the blue Overtone conditioner that I bought for my son who had blue hair for a while. He never used it as the conditioner was on backorder and by the time it came in he had moved on to red. (He cycled through blue, red, purple and now back to blue.) I was struck with a brilliant idea -- what tones orange? Blue! I grabbed the conditioner, believing that it would help me get through to my next bleach bath. You can probably see this coming, but HUGE mistake. My roots were solid blue. The rest was... Yeah, it looked kind of cool except my hair didn't blend at all. Blue roots and then... orange yellow toned down to a muddy grey in spots. I.could.not.wash.it out. Even with detergent.

At this point I had to do something. My job is uber conservative and there is NO WAY that I could go to work like this. NONE. So I put together another bleach bath, this time with 30 developer. I figured since the blue was so new and just from a conditioner, the bleach would lift it reasonably well.

Wrong! My roots, after 45 minutes of the bleach bath, were pale green turquoise over buttery yellow. A really pretty turquoise under the right circumstances.... but keep in mind that the rest of my hair is orange. Turquoise and orange and yellow ... not so good together. The overall combination was horrifying. This was more noticeable than the blue and even worse for my work situation. Thankfully my hair still seemed to be in good shape, thanks again to Olaplex.

I gathered together my red dye, figuring all was lost. But then, in the back of my mind... what about one last try with vitamin C?

I ground up about 20 1000 mg tablets and mixed them with some Suave childrens' shampoo. I layered it on thick, covered it with saran wrap and wrapped it up in a towel. After 15 minutes I took a peek and... the turquoise was GONE. Completely gone. I nearly cried with relief. Right now my nasty looking orange yellow highlighter hair is turquoise-free and soaking in oil.

TLDR vitamin c worked to remove blue conditioner from my bleached hair when bleach could not.