Toning my Highlights with WELLA Color Charm Demi Permanent Hair Color

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Toning my Highlights with WELLA Color Charm Demi Permanent Hair Color

I haven’t found the courage to color my own hair altogether. I am, however, brave enough to undertake smaller, lower-risk color-adjacent jobs myself. Like glossing, toning my highlights is a perfect example of a low-risk, usually professional procedure I’m willing to undertake myself.

Until last July, I hadn’t explored, “proper,” toners or heard of Wella Color Charm Demi Permanent Hair Color. I’m risk averse, so I had been employing purple toning shampoo to tone down brass with this method.

About five months after my last balayage appointment, I decided to take a stab at toning my highlights properly. After several hours of research, I decided to try toning my highlights with the Wella Color Charm Demi Permanent Hair Color line.

Note: I am not a licensed hair professional; I have not gone to beauty school! I’m a STEM professional and like reading and learning for fun. Although I feel comfortable making these decisions for myself, I recommend you do your homework before taking the plunge into DIY chemical treatments.

Fortunately, Wella Color Charm Demi Permanent Hair Color and other Wella products aren’t all pro-only and any ol’ person can buy from Sally Beauty or Amazon.

Selecting the Correct Toner Shade

First, assess your toning goal. My goal was to cool down the brassiness/warmth that my balayage highlights had accumulated over time. Depending on your hair, you might seek something with neutral or cool/ash tones to achieve this goal.

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Lancome Juicy Tubes

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Lancome Juicy Tubes

Luxury brand Lancome isn’t on the forefront of beauty trends, but Lancome Juicy Tubes ($20) glosses endure as a classic and a favorite in the broader community of cosmetics fanciers.

I like the idea of lipgloss, but rarely the execution. As a youngster, I owned a few Wet n Wild tubes (and they still make a shade I used to use and still enjoy!), but never fully embraced them once I started wearing makeup in earnest as an adult. I can cope with the need to reapply often (though I don’t want to), but sticky is unacceptable.

My preferences translate to a relative unwillingness to risk $20 (or even a sale price; at 20% off they’d still be $16) on one. Admittedly, I was curious though: we’re talking about a non trendy/hype machine product with enduring 4.5 star reviews. Could Lancome Juicy Tubes be that good? What would a $20 lip gloss have to do or be in order for you to buy it?

Giving Lancome Juicy Tubes a Shot

There’s no universe in which I spend that much on something that looks like I could’ve gotten it from Claire’s as a child. When I was able to nab a free sample tube, I did.

In (an acronym and) a word:

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Worth it? Tao Clean Sonic Brush Cleaner

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TAO Clean Sonic Makeup Brush Cleaner

Here I am, flirting with danger by reviewing a potentially gimmicky product: the Tao Clean Sonic Brush Cleaner.

How Do You Clean Your Brushes?

You do clean them, don’t you?

Are you a sociopath that enjoys cleaning your brushes? It’s okay, this is a safe space. If you’re like the rest of us, though, there’s a whole subset of the beauty industry targeting the rest of us. There are a whole host of brush cleaning gadgets on the market. Some of them appear to me to be gimmicks, or to be scarcely more efficient than washing individually by hand.

For ages, I ignored them. Like a unitasking kitchen appliance, I wasn’t sold on their value. Furthermore, some seem harsher than doing so by hand. Your tools are an investment: you don’t want to be rough on them by subjecting them to a violently whirring apparatus. Many makeup brush cleaner appliances fall into this category.

Noting my bitching (and negligence), my husband got me the Tao Clean Sonic Brush Cleaner ($ 95) as a birthday gift last year. Thoughtful. Practical. And a good present because I’d never have purchased it for myself at that price point (remember?). But finally, I’m actually keeping my brushes clean at a regular interval.

Tao Clean Sonic Brush Cleaner

So, first things first about the Tao Clean Sonic Brush Cleaner: it isn’t a smol boi. Nearly a foot tall and a touch top-heavy, the appliance comes in two pieces with a detachable A/C power supply. The run time for a single cycle is 2 minutes – in that time, it subtly moves each brush back and forth 50 times a second – or 6000 times.

I don’t know about you, but my manual cleaning (even with this mat) doesn’t result in fifty motions per second.

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Major Hair Loss with TRESemme

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Hair loss with TRESemme

Corporate stupidity, often, is why we can’t have nice things. A lot of people, including me, have experienced hair loss with TRESemme and other shampoos and conditioners in the Unilever family of brands.

Retracing My Steps

Last year, faced with (at last) the end of my Tigi Moisture Maniac stockpile (that I had gleefully found at Costco), I faced the music that the discontinuation was finally final. and decided to return to drugstore options. I’d had decent results with Tresemme in the past, so while the variety I had previously tried wasn’t available, I went for their Moisture Rich shampoo and conditioner.

Hair Loss with TRESemme

We all shed hair, it’s part of the process. But I was shedding a lot. Granted, 2020 was a hell of a year, and we know stress is a contributor to hair loss.

But I’m no stranger to stress, and I was losing hair in fistfuls. I’m not a particularly emotional person, but it brought me to tears. I’d wash and condition my hair in the shower, capturing and coiling the fallen strands on the wall to see the casualties of the day and cry. I’m not even thirty yet. Was I sick? What the hell.

So, given that, it isn’t surprising it took me months to connect the dots that the acceleration of my shedding coincided uncomfortably with the product change.

Unforutnately, I’m Not Alone

When the suspicion occurred to me, I put on my investigative hat and found, to my horror, that Unilever is currently facing a class action suit over hair loss with TRESemme. The litigation is over another product line for containing an ingredient that is known to accelerate hair loss.

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What I Didn’t Buy in 2020

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What I didn't buy in 2020

Last year posed changes for nearly everyone, and for me, that meant there was a lot I didn’t buy in 2020. If you escaped unscathed, good on you. Since this blog is largely about beauty, we’ll keep it in the realm of changes in that regard:

  • Although we all should have been wearing masks when out, if you were not able to work from home, you wore one more than most.
  • If your employment situation changed, perhaps you didn’t have to leave home at all or be on camera.
  • If you transitioned to working from home, you might have found yourself on camera more than you have before.

I’m in the third camp, though I was required to report to the office periodically. All of these things represent, in one way or another, a likely change in your grooming processes: if you have a mask on all day, maybe you’re skipping foundation to avoid, “maskne.” You’re almost certainly skipping lipstick. If you’re on camera, you might be fighting looking pallid and exhausted/sick/etc.

I’ve advocated, for those WFH, to try to continue getting ready – even if not identically – to maintain a routine. It’s good for your mental health! My routine has changed considerably – which has altered my buying habits.

Here’s what I didn’t buy in 2020:

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Start of 2021 Newsletter

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Chatter

I planned on starting 2021 with a nice little newsletter about 2020, trying to grasp at the straws that were the small items to celebrate in spite of what an awful year it was.

In light of the terrorism in America this week, it feels weird and bad to talk about celebrations. There’s a lot of ugliness that’s come to a head, and we’re not out of the woods.

But I decided to talk anyway, albeit in a more subdued tone. The fact that there are horrors and that there is work to be done should not also siphon the joy we worked hard to capture.

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In 2020, I attempted to revive the blog over the summer in hopes of not only reviving it but me.

I modified my post frequency and built up momentum within it, but this proved ambitious. In August, the world (as a metaphor for my time and energy) shook: I ended up with significantly more work than ever. I simultaneously headed into the worst semester I’ve faced. Like before, Beauty Skeptic had to take a back seat.

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I’ve casually mentioned it before, but in addition to my career, I started college in May 2019. My ultimate higher-ed goal is to get a bachelor’s, but have happily just completed (with much exhaustion) a shiny new Associate’s degree in my day job field. I pulled this off in 18 months and achieved magna cum laude, and a bunch of boring academic honors. I’m not particularly good at celebrating my accomplishments, but I think that is worth celebrating.

In spite of trying to push myself to celebrate, I also feel that weird, “unproductive guilt,” that is new(er) for a lot of people. That is wild because I have been anything other than unproductive. Do you struggle with celebrating your accomplishments too? Share yours! We can celebrate together in spirit without the oppression of yet another video call. (I am so tired of seeing my fucking face on webcam, and I bet you are too!) Only demand is to throw on a lipstick you like. Or don’t. Whatever.

Smol Celebrations

The school stuff I mentioned! I completed a degree in 75% of the time it, “usually,” takes and with high marks while working 50+ hour weeks in a high-stress career.

In addition to all of that, I earned a valuable professional credential.

I learned several new skills:

  • I can operate a sewing machine, sew at a novice level, and make masks to keep my family safer.
  • I can make soap (and it’s REALLY FUN and very appropriate for Beauty Skeptic).
  • I can make candles.
  • I tint and wax my own brows now.
  • I can passably-enough cut my hair.
  • I’ve elevated my DIY nail skills to include polygel usage.
  • I successfully grew some produce.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned more about the balance I need and will push a bit more gently going forward to preserve my mental state.

Here’s hoping that I can do better for this site in 2021.