Does lemon juice really lighten hair?

Changing hair colour without dye or bleach...? How about lemons?

So many people have a hair colour that often isn’t quite dark enough to be classed as brown however isn’t bright enough to be blonde either, a colour in-between which some people call “dirty blonde” or “mousey brown”. Personally (me being stuck with this boring and dull in between colour from the ages of 9-14) I thought this hair colour was way too plain and non eye catching compared to other peoples hairs I’d seen. I knew I could either go two ways: the first way being to dye my hair darker so it reached a rich chocolate brown shade which I thought looked good on other people , however I wasn’t too sure whether it would suit me and even after trying all these online “hair colour changer” apps and programmes I knew I wouldn't know for sure if it would be too dark until I dyed it, also I’d never dyed my hair and didn't quite trust these “wash out products”, if it looked bad I didn’t want to be stuck with it for weeks or even months on end so I decided darker obviously wasn’t  for me.

My other option would be to go blonder, the first thing that came to my mind was bleach, however so many people had told me it ruins your hair by making it extremely dry and as my hair is already slightly dry this definitely wasn’t going to work for me. Also the thing with bleach is as soon as you use it as well as being left with damaged hair which is almost white and could risk looking tacky, also if you don’t like it the only way of getting your natural hair colour back is to grow it out and this would take years and years something that I didn’t want to risk. So I gave up!

However a few months later I read a magazine article about using lemon juice on hair to make hair a lighter shade of blonde, all you needed was the juice of a lemon mixed with water and the sun, so I waited for a sunny day bought pre squeezed lemon juice and decided to go for it. I put the lemon juice in a bucket and mixed it with water (I diluted it out quite a lot as I only wanted to test and didn’t want to go too light) I dipped my head into the lemon and water making sure all of my hair was covered and let it dry in the sun, it took a while to dry but because it was sunny I got a tan too sooo s’all good. 

*TIP* Pick a hot sunny day like above so you get a tan too! (Me left, Erin right)

The lemon juice made my hair very dry for about a week and I will admit felt horrible on while it was drying, however as soon as I washed it and straightened it it went a lot better and I was very pleased with the results. My hair was only slightly lighter however it meant that when you looked at it, it looked blonde instead of that in-between colour I always hated and it also showed up my natural highlights more.

As you can see I was very happy with it!

 I would so recommend doing this if you had the same problem I had as I now love my hair colour and it hasn’t damaged my hair at all and my hair still even gets blonder in the summer from the sun. However just a quick warning I have no idea about the effect on a darker shade of hair, you could try it but the risk would be it turning ginger instead of the blonde you thought you were going to get, also if you expect to suddenly go from dark brown hair to light blonde it isn’t going to happen, this simply lightens your hair by a shade or two just to give your hair a bit of extra brightness all year round  

Louise x