The product: Kristin Ess Bittersweet Gloss (Signature Gloss for dark brown/black hair)
Okay. We get it. It’s April 2020, and life is generally a nightmare. Insurance companies are clawing back necessary drugs to earmark them for untested treatments, nursing homes are barring families from visiting (rightly so!), and you cannot find either yeast nor a Nintendo Switch anywhere in sight. On top of all that, you have reduced hours, you’re working from home with your children, and now you have to tone your own damn hair. Well: you cannot have any toilet paper, but you can have a little Kristin Ess Bittersweet Gloss. As a treat.
(I cannot even imagine how difficult that paragraph will be to parse in even just five years.)
How to tone your hair at home
When it comes to at-home hair colouring, toning is the easiest thing you could possibly do. (Hurray!) It’s all about adjusting the tone of your hair, not the lightness. So, you don’t have to worry about chemical burns, bleach damage, or over-processed strands. Heck, you don’t even have to worry that much about stains on your skin or in the tub!
A good toner works as a tint to realign what you already have. Chances are, if you’re looking into toning, your colourist has bleached your hair already. That’s good: the tricky part is getting the bleach in the right places, and it takes a good colourist to know where those places are. Maintenance is easy in comparison, as all you really need to do after that is smear toner everywhere you possibly can and wait twenty minutes every 3-6 weeks.
Think of a toner as a supercharged purple-based shampoo for blondes, except without the purple staining. A toner cannot lift your colour, and for the most part, it can’t take it much darker, either. Instead, it can hide brassy tones, turn copper strands into caramel ones, shift ashy blondes to rose gold, transform a carrot orange to a rich and vibrant red… you get the picture.
How to use a Kristin Ess In-Shower Gloss
Toning at home is always easy, but the Kristin Ess Signature Gloss is especially easy to use. It comes in two parts, with gloves: an ammonia-free, hydrogen peroxide and phosphoric acid-based gloss activator, and a gloss toner. To use, you mix the two together, massage through wet hair (make sure that no strand is left dry if you want an even result throughout your hair), let sit, and shampoo out after 10-20 minutes.
Because this is a toning gloss, you don’t have to section your hair carefully, worry about scalp staining, or fold up each section in aluminum foil. It’s really, really easy — it’s kind of like doing a hair mask from a tube, honestly. I let my gloss sit for 20 minutes throughout my entire head, and achieved very consistent results throughout.
Before on left; after on right, photographed 2 washes after glossing. Look at how SHINY it is!!
Kristin Ess Bittersweet Gloss on dark brown, Asian hair. For reference, my natural colour is a 4 at the roots, a 6 for most of my head, and a 7 at the ends — it sunbleaches like crazy. Bittersweet took me to about a 5 throughout.
Who Kristin Ess Bittersweet Gloss is best for
I was looking to tone my caramel balayage back to my natural brown colour, and Bittersweet was perfect for me. I walked into the bathroom with lovely—but brassy—balayage and walked out with shiny, natural-looking, dark brown hair. My strands are less eye-catching than before (I’m going to tone with Smoky Topaz next time and report back), but they look exactly like a richer, shinier version of my natural hair colour.
It’s been two weeks since I toned my hair, and the results are holding on more strongly than my usual salon tone. I’m just now starting to see my highlights barely peek through, and the initial super-shiny gloss effect has lifted somewhat. I’ve also lost much of the lovely, slightly purple hue left behind by Bittersweet; my natural colour is quite ashy, and my hair honestly looks completely natural to me now.
In total, there are 12 shades of Kristin Ess In-Shower Gloss, with one additional colourless gloss option.
The verdict on toning my hair at home with the Kristin Ess Bittersweet Gloss?
Oh gosh — a resounding yes! I loved using the Kristin Ess Signature Gloss, and will absolutely be maintaining my colour with these both during and after the COVID-19 quarantine ends. It was easy to do, and faster than making a trip to the salon and then returning. Honestly, I’ve never liked my natural colour (I routinely filter it for theNotice to make it look darker, richer, and blacker), and I would totally use a Kristin Ess gloss before a big event even if my hair wasn’t bleached.
On my dry, dark brown hair, this colour has held on well and continues to do so. (I shampoo every other day, so it’s been eight washes.) For future toning, I think Smokey Topaz would have been a better option to maintain a toned version of my balayage, but given how stressed I’ve been about the state of the world… well, I just really didn’t want to think about my hair for a while.
And so, this was perfect.
Availability: $14 USD/$19.99 CAD. 13 shades, permanent at drugstores like Well.ca and Target.
—
Disclaimer: I purchased both Bittersweet and Smokey Topaz from Well.ca. This post contains an affiliate link to Target. While I’ve always loved Well.ca, I’m not impressed that this gloss has gone from $13.99 to $19.99 since I purchased it, and want readers to be aware that they may be hiking their prices during the pandemic. This is not confirmed (Kristin may have simply raised the prices when she added more shades).
