I decided that I wanted to give John Frieda Precision Foam Colour a go.

Then I chickened out and got a friend of mine to try it.

It sounded good: permanent home hair colour that doesn’t make a mess. I haven’t coloured my hair in the privacy of me own in at least … seven years, and part of it is the mess it makes in the bath. But in this Economic Climate®, spending a tonne of money on my highlights seems to make less sense. But knowing how important the care of The Hair is to me? Dilemma!

It looked good, too, I mean, as far as you can trust pictures on websites and boxes. I don’t know how the topic came up — except that maybe I talk about beauty stuff all the time — but when ‘Audrey’ expressed interest in offering up her follicles for experimentation, I leapt at the chance.

And hoped for the best. Because I would hate to lose a friend over haircare.

Here we went!

Before:

I can never see anything wrong with other people’s hair, and Audrey’s is no exception. It could use a bit of a lift, but I think the colour has held up well, from whenever she last got it done. Ah, sure, but we see things in out own hair that no one else does; speaking personally, no one on God’s green earth could look at my own hair as often as I do.

The thing that worries me about doing my own hair colour is the flatness of permanent home care concoctions. I’ve been getting highlights for those seven years, and am used to the depth of that technique; I remember, unfondly, a couple of particularly opaque home care outcomes. Audrey doesn’t seem to be worried about this. Okay, so!

The box, the contents, the directions. Already, this is not how I remembered home hair colouring to be: surely it is more complicated than this? And look! photographs of an actual human model. This seems to make difference to me — easier to follow or something?

I also never questioned how the foam was going to work. I’ve become acquainted with foam cleansers, which are liquid in the bottle and foam when you press the dispensing thingie, so it never occurred to me to doubt that this would work.

Good thing! I can save my doubt for something else. Here, Audrey demonstrates that when you mix the Colourant {2} with the Developer {1}, you do indeed get foam!

That is amazing.

Audrey repaired to the bath, and I left her in peace to apply the foam. She reported that it was a bit of a learning curve, for all the right reasons: it didn’t drip! It didn’t get all over the place! She massaged it in like it was shampoo, and even though her hair is fairly long, she didn’t use it all up! I remember, one time, having to buy two boxes of colour to do my hair!

I set my iPhone timer for thirty minutes, and we sat and had a chat. Not just about the fact the foam didn’t smell bad, didn’t sting as some hair colours can, and how the foam made it really easy to saturate the hair — we did manage to find other things to talk about.

Like the fact that the treatment only takes thirty minutes: that’s really fast, isn’t it? Like I said, it’s been years, and I haven’t been keeping up a’tall, but that seems major rapid.

Ding dong ding dong! {I like the ‘bell tower’ alarm.} Off Audrey went to shampoo it out. We had a look at the effect when her hair was still wet, and yeah, it looked good, but you can’t really tell beyond that fact the coverage on the roots looked good.

Silence, apart from the hair dryer. Now, this is where I got really nervous. What if she hates it? What if it is patchy and flat and just not nice? There were some many ways this could go wrong…

The after with the before!

And a slightly soft focus close up:

Rich! Also: Audrey’s hair felt really soft. Amazingly soft, for a home hair care job. The depth and variety of the colour was also impressive, and encourages me to try this for myself.

The verdict? Shockin’ simple and fast and thorough, with a rich, deep result. We’ll fill you in on ‘rate of fade’ — but let’s hope for the continuation of miracles!

***

John Frieda Precision Foam Colour is available in 12 shades in Ireland; RRP €13.25.