Sienna Miller’s hair disaster may have had her taking some extreme steps to rectify a henna-gone-wrong dye treatment, but for us, her use of ketchup to correct the green tinge in her blonde locks means one thing: a cheap and easily accessible correction method!
Let’s get real honest real quick here: henna hair dye isn’t the easiest thing on earth! It takes a precious amount of research, YouTube watching and sitting and waiting as the color sets to get the perfect CurlyNikki color — and not everyone has that patience. Plus, for women with lighter hues, henna can be even more tricky. In general, the darker your natural hair is, the more you can stand to mess up a bit with the henna application. Sure, it may come out a little red when you stand in the sunlight, but other than that, if you have dark hair, it will just look darker. Cool. But for women with blonder tresses, a henna misapplication can interact with previous dye jobs and give hair a tinge of green instead. Not so cool.
In an interview with Marie Claire magazine, Miller admits, “I once used henna to dye my hair brown for an audition, thinking I was being clever as it’s all natural. Little did I know it was the worst thing I could have done as it coats the follicles so that nothing else can penetrate.”
Henna is a natural hair strengthener besides it’s coloring qualities. Strengthening products restore health to your hair most often by filling in the holes in your hair follicles that have developed from damaging hair care practices over time. Much like a protein treatment, henna hair dye fills in these holes and creates a shinier, stronger look for your locks. Of course, if the henna dye job goes wrong, removing the color from your hair is more difficult, given that is isn’t just sitting on your hair. It has actually penetrated it.
Now, for all your blonde hair mavens out there who have been schooled in the greening hair properties of chlorine, too much sun and so on, the old ketchup wive’s tale has proven to be true for Sienna. To combat the green tint, “I ended up having to put ketchup in it for about a year to get rid of the green tinge.”
Don’t believe it? Well, ketchup has long been known for its ability to neutralize green hair accidents, especially when it comes to blonder shades. The process is pretty simple and the outcome, at least according to Sienna, is totally worth the smell and mess.
- Use REAL tomato ketchup. Remember, you are putting this in your hair. Be sure to read the ingredients and find the most organic or all-natural tomato ketchup that you can. Heinz will work fine too, but you don’t want to be adding any additional damage from ingredients to your already green curls.
- Coat the hair with the ketchup from roots to ends and let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes. To help alleviate the mess and any drips, grab yourself a plastic cap and put it on over the treatment.
- Rinse and repeat if necessary. Hop in the shower and shampoo and condition your hair as usual. Be sure to use a clarifying shampoo to get all of the product out of your hair. Not all shades of green in blonde hair will be corrected with only one treatment, so repeat daily if necessary until the color fades.
Would you use ketchup to correct a dye-job-gone-wrong that resulted in green curls?