Recently I've fallen in love with toning my hair silver, after many years of just keeping it a natural light blonde color. Actually my hair isn't silver at the moment - it has a light blue hue with turquoise tips, but I wanted to talk a little bit about different methods for achieving silvery or grayish hair. My opinions on these products are based on personal experiences, so they might work differently with someone else's hair.
Shampoos
When I started experimenting with toning my hair a couple of years ago, I turned to silver shampoos. The first one I ever tried, was the Sheer Blonde Tone-Restoring Shampoo by John Frieda.
I think the price was somewhere around 15€ (which is too expensive, in my opinion). Anyway, I wish I could tell you that this product was awesome but unfortunately it wasn't. It did absolutely nothing to my hair :D So after wasting my money on this product I gave up toning my hair for a while but luckily I found some other products that worked better on my hair. I wouldn't really recommend purchasing this shampoo, unless you're not actually wanting to get silver/gray hair, but more trying to make the warm tones in your hair a bit less noticeable.
The other shampoo that I tried was the Silver Shampoo by Four Reasons, which I bought about a year ago, if I remember correctly.
The price was about 10€, and I'm happy to tell you that this one actually worked. After letting it sit on my hair for about five minutes, I could definitely notice a change in the color. It neutralized the yellow, brassy tones in my hair and made it a lot more cool toned. I would recommend trying this one out, because toning your hair with silver shampoo doesn't require that much work, just use it instead of your regular shampoo. The only thing I didn't like about this product was the packaging, because once I accidentally left it on it's side in the shower and the last bits of product poured out over night :( It also left my hair quite dry, but I just used a repairing hair mask as a conditioner afterwards so it wasn't too bad.
Treatments
This is actually by far the only silver mask I've tried, but it has worked really well: Reflection Silver treatment by Cutrin.
This one was about 9€, I think, and I have to say that it really is worth the price. I used it about once a week to maintain the silver tones, and it also left my hair feeling nice and soft. This treatment needs about 15 minutes to work, depending on the desired result of course, so you can do something else while waiting. It's best to apply this on hair that has a bit of water in it, because otherwise you'll need a lot of this to cover your whole head, which was the mistake I made when I used it for the first time and ended up wasting some product. Once you keep that in mind, this is definitely a good product and worth trying, and I'll most likely repurchase this once it runs out.
Mixing your own toner?
Toning your hair with this method takes a bit more time, but it's great if you have the patience. Basically, you use a semi-permanent purple hair dye and mix it with white conditioner, which you'll need a lot of so I always try to buy the cheapest one, as it doesn't matter what brand it is. Here's some of the mixture that I usually use when toning my hair with this technique:
To make this, I used a little bit of Directions semi-permanent hair dye ( 9€) in "Violet" and mixed it with white conditioner that cost about one euro. Directions also make a silver toner which you can use straight away, but I find that mixing my own toner saves a lot of money. The conditioner lightens the purple a lot, so you're left with a pastel color on your hair. Of course you can make the mixture a bit darker, and you'll get pastel or vibrant purple hair, which will fade within a couple of washes or weeks. Usually I dye my hair quite dark with this and then when it fades, I'm left with a pretty silvery/purple hue on my hair as the purple neutralizes the yellow tones. As I mentioned, this takes a bit of time. Mixing the dye with the conditioner to desired darkness first, then applying it evenly on your hair (takes about 20-30 minutes when I do it), and then waiting for it to develop anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Because you only need a tiny bit of the actual purple color and a lot of the cheap conditioner, this is a good option for students that don't have a lot of money (like me :D) in the long run.
