Sunday, 24 February 2013

Schwarzkopf Ultimate Colour Home Hair Colouring Launch

This week I attended the launch of Schwarzkopf's Ultimate Colour Home Hair Coluring. I haven't attended many product launches since Kiki was born. I just found it too hard organising baby sitters for her and the Crazy Kid. I have to confess that I went to this launch for the wrong reasons. As soon as I soon as I saw on the invitation that menu being served at the launch had been prepared by two hatted chef Christine Mansfield I accepted immediately. It may have been the wrong reason for going to a launch but thank God that I did because I actually walked away from the launch more excited about the new product that I had just leant about, rather than the food eaten (and the food was bloody fantastic so that says a lot about the product!).

Ultimate Colour is a world first innovation in home hair colour. It is a foam colour that is re-usable. With every other home hair colour on the market, you have to mix the colourant with the developer before applying the dye. This means that if there is any left over it cannot be saved and reused. The difference with Ultimate Colour is that the developer and colourant are housed in different compartments within the bottle and when you press to release the colouring foam, an equal amount of both the colourant and developer squirt out leaving you with a pile of white developer foam and coloured foam on your hand. You can then mix the two together on your hand, or if you are particularly lazy, apply it straight to your hair and mix it on your head. Any left over dye can then be saved for up to 3 years for the next application. If you have longer hair it will be enough for a root touch up but if you have short hair (as in a typical man's length hair) you can potentially get 3 or more applications out of a bottle.



Back in my DINK days (double income no kids), I would always pay someone to colour my hair. Once the Crazy Kid, and then his sister came along I had neither the time nor the disposable cash to get my hair regularly coloured at a hairdresser. So, I returned to my stingy student days and resumed colouring my own hair at home. I had thought that the best thing to happen to home hair colouring was the introduction of the foam dyes. I absolutely love them and find that the results really are salon worthy. I make no mess when I use them, have no drips and never end up with missed patches in my hair. My favourite, to date, has been the John Frieda Precision Foam Colour and I have returned to this one about 4 or 5 times. But the one thing the really annoyed me was that I would always have a third of a bottle of the dye left that I would end up having to chuck. Then, a couple of months down the track, the colour would still be looking rich; however, my bloody grey hairs would be rearing their ugly heads again meaning that I would have to buy a new packet of dye just to hide the handful of greys that were annoying the crap out of me! (I did try plucking them for a while but unfortunately am loosing that battle and, if you have ever wondered whether the rumour is true that if you pull a grey hair out then seven grow back, it isn't - see here).

I haven't had the opportunity to trial Ultimate Colour just yet as the stock had just arrived in the country at the time of the launch, but hope to do so in the coming weeks. At the moment they have 9 colours in the range, which you can see below. The colours that I plan on testing are 465 Dark Chocolate Brown and possibly 668 Hazelnut (though I am not sure whether my naturally dark brown hair would be too dark for this shade) and then, come winter, I like to put a red shade through my hair so will take 388 Dark Red Brown for a test drive.











At this stage I am not sure of an exact release date or price for the Schwarzkopf Ultimate Colour but will have that information on hand when I review the product so will update then.

What are your thoughts? Are you excited? Which colour in the range would you go for?