Chocolate Hair Color: How to Choose a Tint

Chocolate colour – sensual, stylish, seductive – looks expensive and attracts the attention of others. Its charms have already been appreciated by dozens of celebrities, including Megan Fox, Penelope Cruz, Jessica Alba, Olivia Palermo, Victoria Beckham – the star list can be continued indefinitely.

The pros and cons

The virtues of a chocolate shade:

The colour has a huge palette of shades.
It is combined with long, medium and short haircuts (care, cascade).
It can be obtained with both chemical and natural dyes.
Color is well combined with bright make-up – for example, red lipstick and smoky eyes.
Suitable for all colour types of appearance.
Depending on the shade chosen, chocolate can give more visual volume to the hair.
The coloured hair looks natural (except purple or pink).
Suitable for gradient dyeing and colouring – balayage, omber, melting.
Hides grey well.

The drawbacks are worth highlighting:

If your natural shade of hair is light, you will have to regularly dye your growing roots.
Darker shades of chocolate require maintaining the skin in perfect condition, as they make its slightest imperfections visible, emphasize wrinkles, bags under the eyes and make the face look thinner.
Too dark tones can age.
The colour highlights the splitting and brittle ends of the hair.
The Scandinavian type of appearance (light skin, blue eyes and a tendency to freckles) is not always combined with chocolate shades.

How to match the hue to your colour scheme

There are 4 main types of colour: winter, spring, summer and autumn. Winter includes girls with a contrasting appearance in a cold range. They are recommended to choose dark, bitter and icy chocolate. Spring type girls are those with a warm, soft appearance and are recommended to choose milk, light, copper and golden chocolate. Light-cold tones of appearance and muted cold shades are recommended for summer. Autumn type – dark warm appearance, dark warm chocolate will suit you.

Shades of chocolate

The chocolate palette can be divided into two groups: the first group includes cold shades and the second group includes warm ones.

Cold

Cold tones are mainly used for dyeing women’s hair in winter and summer appearance. Representatives of these colour types have porcelain-white or brown skin and blue, grey or brown eyes.

Dark and bitter chocolate

The shade is close to black, but it is softer – it is not so bright and has dark brown tones. It is suitable for brownish brown-eyed girls as well as for women with pale skin and light eyes. Dark chocolate looks great with bright makeup.

Frosty, icy

It’s a bit like bitter chocolate, but in contrast, it has more cold and blond notes. Harmonizes with winter and summer colours, but badly combined with autumn. If you wish, you can choose a suitable shade even for the colour type “spring”.

Chocolate black

Close to frosty and dark chocolate, but in contrast, it has more black notes. This shade of hair fits both dark and light-skinned (except Scandinavian girls). But it should be taken into account that it emphasizes the flaws of the skin.

Chocolate with ash/grey tint

Light brown shade with pronounced ashes. Perfect for girls whose natural hair colour varies from blonde to dark rustic. Perfectly harmonizes with porcelain-white leather and cold grey or blue eyes. Worse combined with darker skin and warm brown eyes.

Chocolate-blue

This colour is close to chocolate ashes but is softer due to light brown inclusions. Combines with grey, blue, green eyes and light skin.

Chestnut/natural chocolate

A perfect solution for those who prefer naturalness. In this shade, the dark, saturated brown colour is mixed with golden highlights. The natural shade of chocolate looks good with brown and blue eyes, the skin colour can be any – from pale to dark.

Chocolate pink

A shade that combines a brown base with a cold pink tray. Slightly reminiscent of caramel, but the chocolate-pink hue is colder. This colour fits well with the summer and spring colour types.

Chocolate-purple

A rich shade that’s a cross between chocolate and eggplant. It is not easy to get such a shade, so it is recommended to contact an experienced colourist for dyeing. The colour fits well with grey, blue and blue eyes. The skin tone can be either dark or light.

Warm

Warm tones are perfect for the owners of autumn appearance – with ivory skin or light freckles, brown, green or amber eyes.

Milk, light chocolate

Cocoa and vanilla predominate in the total weight of brown pigment. Milk chocolate” colour is harmoniously combined with tanned skin, as well as ivory, brown and green eyes. It is not “friendly” with dark skin and light, almost transparent eyes: coloured hair just merges visually with it, and the eyes are lost against this background.

Caramel chocolate

Chocolate caramel has golden warm notes. Ideal for “autumn” women with light or slightly tanned skin and light brown eyes. Worse combined with very dark skin and dark eyes (as in the case of women of the Mediterranean type or Negroid race), as the hair, in this case, looks unnatural.

Chocolate red

A soft tint in which brown notes are matched by copper-red tones. It is an excellent solution for the “autumn” colour scheme, as chocolate red hair blends well with green and light brown eyes, light skin and freckles. Not suitable for women with a contrasting appearance.

Chocolate-nut

In addition to the main brown pigment, this has soft beige shades with a slight shine. Suitable for dark brown eyes, pale or slightly touched skin.

Golden chocolate

A soft combining light brown colour with a golden shine. Hair of this shade is shimmering in the sun, and haircuts look voluminous. The shade looks very beautiful in the neighbourhood with brown skin, brown or green eyes. It is not suitable for representatives of contrasting “winter”.

Chocolate spicy

This colour is represented by small inclusions of the warm shade of cinnamon. Beautifully combined with the olive or peach tones of the face, light brown, green or nutty eyes. The chocolate-spicy colour is an excellent variant for the shiny hair.

Chocolate red

Brown colour with diluted reddish reflections – mahogany, mahogany or cherry. Chocolate red strands are suitable for girls with light skin, blue or grey eyes and freckles.

Chocolate dyeing

Types of paint

Before you start dyeing, you need to find the right type of paint:

Professional paints

These dyes are mainly used in beauty salons. Professional hair dyes contain more care ingredients than mass-market products. Because of this, the cost of professional cosmetics is higher, but the quality of dyeing is at a completely different level. Chocolate shades are available in the palettes of such brands as Kapous, Londa Professional, FarmaVita, Matrix ColorSync, etc.

Mass-market level paints

This variant of dyes is more affordable: they can be bought in most supermarkets, their price is quite affordable, and you can use these colours not only in the salon but also at home. You can choose the colour of chocolate in the palette of colours Palette, Garnier and Estelle.

Natural dyes (henna and Basma)

Hannah and Basma in combination with other natural dyes allow you to get different shades of chocolate – depending on the original colour of the hair, the number of dyes and exposure time. For dyeing hair in the saturated colour of dark chocolate usually take henna and Basma in a ratio of 1:1. You can experiment with shades by adding henna and Basma to the mixture of walnut decoctions, strong ground or instant coffee, tea and hop cones.

Recommendations for colouring and selecting paint

Follow the recommendations to change the colour to chocolate to be successful:

If your natural hair colour is black and you want to get a milk chocolate bar, you’ll have to use durable ammonia-based paint and pre-colourise the hair.
If you have blonde or lightened hair, I recommend that you go to a hairdresser! As with self-colouring colour can turn out brighter than desired or go into darkening in some places. Before staining, specialists usually do a preliminary pigmentation and then apply the paint.
If you are blonde, you are lucky. As the majority of paints are calculated on such a base.
If you have previously made dyeing with chemical dyes, and now decided to paint henna or Basma, or vice versa, you need to wash off the old paint beforehand. To wash off the henna and Basma will have to make a lot of effort (it is better to contact a specialist).
If you are not ready to cardinally change the colour, use as an experiment shampoo or foam.
Darker, naturally coloured hair can get a warmer shade (red or red). This is due to the fact that the darker ones have their own intense pigment. So buy colder chocolate.
If you have uneven hair colour, then you should apply the colour in parts: first, on the lightest curls, then on a little darker and finally, on the darkest ones. The interval will be about 5-7 minutes, depending on the paint.
If you have a bright hair colour (red, orange, etc.), it is recommended to wash it off first, and then apply the paint. If this is not done, the colour will turn out to be with a shade of old colouring.

What happens to the colour after the time has elapsed

After a while, the colour will begin to wash. If you dyed in warm dark chocolate, then after a month, it will lighten up and copper or red hue will appear. If you were light before painting in the dark, the colour will be washed away even faster and the colouring will have to be repeated.

The colour is best kept on natural brunettes and brushes. In summer, the hair colour will change even faster, as they will also burn out from the sun rays. If the hair colour was originally cold, then after a month it will be warm.

Hair care after dying

It is recommended that you use products marked “For coloured dark hair” for washing your hair.
Extend the dark shade of life can be with the help of special mousses and balms, which contain a brown pigment.
To maintain the colour, you can use folk remedies: for example, twice a week to rinse the hair with strong coffee or tea.
It is also important to keep your hair in good condition – make masks, use conditioner, cut off split ends in time, protect the hair from direct sunlight in summer and from frost in winter.

Chocolate is a universal colour, it looks equally stylish as in the form of romantic hairstyles with curls, and in the form of short daring hairstyles. Choose the shade that best suits your look – and the result won’t leave you indifferent!