Brunette Hair Style Photos and Advice

Tips For Choosing, Achieving and Maintaining Your Color

Shades of brunette range from a light ash tone to a deep chestnut... and everything in between.

Browns are classic, rich, mysterious, and the easiest of all haircolors to maintain.

This page contains a gallery featuring forty shades of brown hair color along with brief descriptions of each shade.

You'll also find advice for choosing a shade of brown that will suit your complexion and tips for maintaining the depth and shine that make for a beautiful brunette, regardless of the shade.

Photos     Tips     Maintenance

Brunette Hair Style Photos

Click any image to enlarge and start slideshow

Use this virtual hair style program to try on hair colors before you commit.

Maintaining Brown Hair Color

Keep the rich brown tones present in your hair color by using a color depositing shampoo and conditioner.

The conditioners work the best because they don't contain cleansing agents and can be left on the hair for long periods.

The longer they're left on and more often they're used, the more pigment is deposited onto your hair strand.

My favorite pigmented shampoos and conditioners are the L'oreal Colorist Collection line, available at Amazon.com. The L'Oreal Colorist Collection comes in the following shades...

Brunette Hair Color With Professional Results

PREPARE YOUR HAIR
For best results (and to avoid common color mishaps), make sure your hair is ready for the color.

Minerals from water, chlorine from swimming pools, and build-up from styling products can all impede the haircolor formula's ability to do it's thing.


Use Joico K-Pak Chelating Shampoo before coloring to help eliminate these impurities.

Do you color your own hair? If so, you know that achieving the shade you want can be difficult. The color you see on the box is NOT necessarily the color you'll end up with.

If your hair is a natural brunette shade, I recommend doing very little with it, color-wise. Browns sometimes need to be deepened to add impact, which can easily be done with a semi or demi permanent color.

Many times, all that's needed to boost a brunette shade is a bit of shine. Apply a color gloss, in either a tinted shade or clear (Sebastian ColourShines is a great choice, although sadly it's been discontinued but can still be found on some sites).

If you feel the need to lighten things up a bit, opt for a few foiled highlights, rather than an all-over blonde hair color. That way, you'll get a more natural look, without the heavy maintenance that's inevitable when lightening brown hair to blonde.

Take the time to learn about hair color chemistry. The more you understand, the better your hair color results will be.

ASH BROWN

Shades of ash brown or dark ash blonde are super hot right now. Ash shades can be difficult to achieve with artificial hair color because of the tendency for orange/yellow underlying pigments to show through with even the slightest amount of lifting action.

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LIGHT AUBURN BRUNETTE

This shade is just on the verge of belonging in the Red Hair Color section. It's a very warm shade of brunette, which brightens a medium to fair, warm skin tone. Avoid this shade if you have a cool (pinkish) skin tone.

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MEDIUM 'TRUE' BRUNETTE

Thoughts of "brunette hair color" often bring to mind a picture of precisely this shade. It is a beautiful, rich shade -- not too light, not too dark. This is another one that's difficult to capture with artificial permanent haircolor. If this is the shade you're trying to achieve, opt for a semi-permanent, which doesn't lift the underlying pigment.

The underlying pigment always brings gold and warmth into the picture when there is lifting action, and permanent hair color formulas (usually containing 20 volume developer) always operate in a lift-then-deposit process. The pigments deposited most times aren't strong enough to counteract the strong underlying orange pigments. To avoid the gold, go with a deposit only, no ammonia, semi-permanent hair color.

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DARK BROWN HAIR COLOR

This deep rich, shade of brunette has a warm hue, great for a brightening effect on warm skin tones. A sprinkle of very thin highlights just a shade or two lighter can be a nice addition to add some dimension to the color.

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DEEPEST BRUNETTE

This shade is slightly darker than the one above, and has cool undertones, rather than warm. Can you see the difference? If you can, great! You're developing the eye of a colorist!

The cool hue makes this color suitable for (you guessed it), cool skin tones. A clear color gloss, applied every few months, will maintain the shine that is so important with such a deeply saturated color.

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BROWN HAIR WITH FLAIR!

Jazz up a solid brown hair color with panels of amber or another bright shade. Slice out a few strips of hair near the front. Get creative with the positioning. Consider how the hair will lay. Not just the highlighted piece, but the hair around it too. Use foil highlights to color just the section(s) you want lightened. The effect is made more dramatic the lighter (or brighter) you go. This technique can be done using any combination of colors.

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OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

If you're coloring your hair to a brown shade that is darker than your natural color, consider having your eyebrows tinted. An esthetician can apply a specially formulated dye to deepen the shade so it matches your new hair color. Or you can try Mimic Color Kits which is a temporary colored powder that colors and contours the brows.

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