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Once you’ve identified your season and embraced it, the next step is committing to your color scheme. 

Which is honestly…harder than it sounds. 

But when you’ve committed yourself to your cool season, as a summer or winter, you might realize that you have unwanted warm tones in your hair. 

This is especially likely if your hair is color-treated, where you might find that you have red tones or orange tones as a result of the lightening process. So treating unwanted brassiness can help remove a lot of the warmth that might be clashing with your coloring. 

(If you’re a summer season considering changing your hair color completely, you can check out my post on the Best Hair Colors for Soft Summer Type!)

Why neutralize red tones in hair for cool seasons?

So, basically the philosophy in color analysis is to achieve harmony in your coloring and follow the lead of your natural features.

So, 

• If your skin, hair, and eyes run cool, you’re looking to echo that coolness in the colors that you wear. 
• If you have a lot of contrast between your skin and eyes, you’re looking for similar contrast between your features and your clothing.
• And if your coloring is light, your clothing should be light too. 

(This is not always the advice you get everywhere in the world — for years I had a stylist who insisted I needed red hair to “warm me up”. Sometime you’ll get style advice that is focused on getting you towards some imaginary version of neutral. That’s fine if it’s what you’re going for, but if you’re doing color analysis, it’s not what we prioritize. We’re looking, instead, for colors and styling that are going to create a sense of harmony between our features and our clothing. 

And as a soft summer, all that red dye did was bring out the redness in my rosacea-prone skin. Now I mostly stick to my natural color, but any ash-toned dye is going to be most harmonious on a cool-toned season. 

Even within the seasons, there are variations in how cool we need our colors to be. For cool summer and cool winter subtypes, even a neutral toned dress or scarf will look slightly “off” or unflattering. Those subtypes are defined by their coolness, and the cool tone is the most pronounced aspect of their coloring. So any kind warmth is too much warmth for them. That means any red tones will look wrong, but it also means that red tones don’t appear naturally in their hair. It’s a result of bleaching or lifting. 

Soft summer red tones in hair 

I’m a soft summer, so I wear neutrals well enough…that is actually how I finally determined that I am indeed a soft summer. I can wear rosy browns or a very gray khaki and the resulting look is very cohesive. 

So, for soft summers, those red tones are not the end of the world, but they do diminish the overall effect of our coolness. They also can appear naturally in our hair, unlike our cool summer sisters. That’s because we are the closest to neutral out of all the summers…we are still cool but not as cool as the light and cool summer types. So, in my natural medium-brown hair, red tones appear over the summer from the sun. 

The other consideration for soft summers is that for a lot of us, we are prone to redness in our skin. And those red tones in our hair are picking up the redness in our skin, making us look blotchy. If you feel like your face always looks red and you’re a cool-toned season, it can be super helpful to tone-correct your hair and see if it reduces some of that redness. It’s cheaper than a facial and improves your look more. Even though your skin is exactly the same, it looks a lot clearer because that red isn’t being amplified by red tones in your hair. 

Even though we soft summers are maybe most prone to getting those red tones in our natural hair, this is a consideration for all cool seasons. Those red or brassy tones are not doing you any favors if your skin runs cool.  

So, now, let’s look at some options for how to remove red tones from hair at home. 

Removing red tones with dye

This is probably the simplest way if you, like me, get red tones during the summer but not the rest of the year. 

At the end of every summer, I buy a box of dye in my natural color. For me, that’s this: 

But I wrote a whole post about this topic that I would love to point you to, that offers suggestions for every hair color and shade (INCLUDING A COOL-TONED RED, THIS IS NOT A DRILL): Best Hair Colors for Soft Summer Type – Color Analysis.

If this is a seasonal issue for you and it’s not really worthwhile to be buying special shampoo every few months, it can be really nice to just dye it and move on. You don’t really see as much of this suggestion out there as compared to hair glazes and special shampoos, but if you are a low-maintenance type of girl, permanent color will stay in place until it grows out and address those red tones in one afternoon. 

I dye my hair back to this natural color in September every year, and that’s it! No drama, no hair colorist, no unwanted tones. If you’re changing your color, this gets more complicated. 

Color theory + cancelling out warm tones

Okay, we’re not going to spend a million paragraphs on this. Honestly, it’s not as complicated as people make it here on the internet. 

You can “cancel out” a color with the color that’s opposite it on the color wheel. 

So, like, everyone knows someone with a light blonde hair color who uses a purple shampoo, right? Because if you just wash your hair with whatever, bleached blond hair gets that yellowness to it. And the purple pigments “cancel” the yellow. The yellow isn’t removed…it’s just covered up by the opposite color. That’s why they have to use it weekly, so the violet pigments don’t wash out. 

That’s it! I don’t know why people make it so complicated. 

What color cancels Red for my hair color?

So, light blondes need purple. 

If you have medium blond to light brown hair, you’re likely seeing those brassy orange tones. Highlights can sometimes start to look like straight up orange hair. So you’re looking for something like blue shampoo or a blue toner that’s going to deposit blue pigment and cancel some of that brassy orange color. 

And for medium brown hair to black hair, you’re likely getting a truer red color in those unwanted red tones. That reddish color can be cancelled out with a green product! 

For any hair color, you can also try an ash toner — this will deposit cool tones over your hair. There are better ones for targeting different hair colors. So you can choose what’s appropriate for addressing yellow tones in blond or red tones in a darker hair color.

Both of the above are toners that get applied just like an ash dye. But they aren’t really there to dramatically change your color or depth. They just deposit ash color pigments and change your shade. I’m going to try the ash brunette instead of my regular box dye this summer! This hair toner can completely reset your undertone.

Removing red tones from blond hair

If you’re dealing with brassy hair, especially after lifting your color, you want something that’s going to help address yellow or orange underlying pigments. 

The ash toner above is a great option! You want one specifically for blondes so that it doesn’t deposit any darker color into your hair!

Blondes often rely on shampoo in either purple or blue. As we talked about above, you should choose the one that better addresses your problem color. 

If you’re dealing with mostly yellowing, you should opt for a purple toning shampoo. This Amika one is super popular: 

I think shampoos are an especially good choice for blondes. There’s less risk of accidentally imparting a permanent color or tint on your light, porous locks. Platinum hair should be especially careful about using permanent toning options! Purple toner in a shampoo is really your best bet if you’re very light. 

If you’re super loyal to the specific shampoo that you currently use, the best way to adapt it is with a product like the OGX Purple Toning Drops. They can be added to any shampoo. When you’re using this product, mix it in your hand the dozen times, and use less than you need. Otherwise, you might turn out accidentally lilac! 

And if you have a slightly darker blonde or a very light brunette and your hair is more orangey, you might prefer a blue shampoo. I can speak to this product from experience because I used it when I bleached to a lighter hair color years ago: 

Matrix was the preferred hair care line at that salon, but I kept buying it after I moved out of that city. It’s a great product that really worked to neutralize red tones in my hair. 

Removing red tones from brown hair

For brunettes, our red tones are actually red, so the putple or blue toners will do less for us. If you’re a very light brunette who pulls more orange than red, you might like the blue toner above. 

​But for the rest of us…opposite red on the color wheel is green. So we’re looking for a green toner or shampoo to knock out those red tones. 

Okay, let’s talk about a green hair mask. Because for whatever reason, green is MUCH more likely to be visibly green in your hair than the purple is if your hair is too light for it. 

If you click through to the Amazon reviews, there are several women who had light brown hair, or highlights, who ended up with visibly green hair. 

On medium to darker shades of brown, green toner is a game changer and super effective. But if you’re buying green when you shouldn’t buy green…you’re taking a risk. 

For the light/medium brown girls like me who don’t want to spend a weekend staring in the mirror wondering if their brassiness is orange or red….play it safe and start with the blue, and maybe progress to green if you feel like there’s still some red left behind. But green isn’t “better” or more effective than blue…it’s just a matter of what color you’re trying to address. 

If you’re not sure, you can also go with ash and sidestep the whole color wheel thing. 

Ash glaze to remove red tones from hair at home

This is my second time writing about this product without doing a proper review of it. But: I bought the Le Gloss hair glaze in Smoky Bronde and it is officially soft summer approved! 

I do plan to write a full post review of it at some point! But since it’s relevant to this post… I was overall happy with this product. It didn’t have the “wow” shine that some glazes do. But it absolutely brought a distinct cool tone to my hair. I’m already getting a little red from being outside, and this really helped neutralize it. I also felt that my hair was much less frizzy than it tends to get in humidity. 

So another option if you’re just looking for a once-a-month choice that will neutralize red tones in your hair butwon’t change the depth of your color at all. 

Planning to reduce redness? Pin this post to come back to it!