Quarantine Hair Care: Covering Your Roots at Home

With the coronavirus lockdown keeping us all at home — and the Tony Wood Hair salon temporarily closing to keep stylists and clients safe! — taking hair care into your own hands will be the norm for the time being.

I’ve been arranging Skype calls with our clients for a couple of weeks now, advising them on how to look after their hair from home.

Now, our colour specialist Elsie has joined the self-isolation styling fun with this video showing you how to hide your roots until we can next welcome you back to our luxurious Colour Lounge!

Method One: Hats!

Hats provide all-over coverage, so they’re ideal for hiding roots. Though they’re perhaps not the most practical things to wear around the house, a good ten-gallon stetson does give you the freedom to pretend you’re riding around your gaff on a horse when you hit day nine of self-quarantine and start hallucinating that you’re a cowboy.

Method Two: Headbands!

A five-second Google hunt will reveal a huge range of stylish headbands, with all the colours and decorations you can dream of.

Align the headband with the strip of root colour you want to cover. When you’re ordering your headband, don’t just buy one that covers your roots as they are now; get one that’s a little bit thicker! With how uncertain things are at the moment, it’s hard to know how long it might be before you next have your roots spruced up by a colour professional.

Pro tip: pull some of the hair from behind your headband forward, so there’s some interesting depth and shapes peeking out from beneath the band.

You can also tease the hair around your crown to add some volume that counters the flattening effect headbands can have. See Elsie’s video above for a showcase of how to best achieve this.

Method Three: Head Scarves!

Dig out that band tee you’ve not worn since 2009 or give a second life to the ancient bedding that’s resting mummified in the back of your closet. Head scarves can be fashioned from any fabric you have laying around your home!

Tear yourself off a good metre of makeshift scarf and follow Elsie’s video to see two rather bohemian ways to twist and tie it into a DIY root-covering accessory.

Head scarves are one of the best ways to cover roots with minimal effort, and you can adjust them to be as chunky as needed.

Using box colour to cover roots

We appreciate the temptation to turn to ordered-online box colour to keep your roots spruced up until you’re next in the salon! But we politely advise against this at every opportunity, for your safety and satisfaction.

Firstly, store-bought colour is often a one-size-fits-all solution. At Tony Wood Hair, we guide you through a full consultation before even thinking about your restyle — that includes allergy tests for your skin and scalp. Using products that aren’t suitable for your hair or skin can cause long-term issues, especially as some manufacturers use unnatural chemicals to cut costs.

From a technical standpoint, box colour also lacks some core molecules that make hair vibrant, healthy, and shiny. Professional hair stylists know which colours and emulsifiers to mix together to make your hair look as authentically ‘Hollywood’ as the luscious locks celebrities swish around on the front of home dye kits. Box colour, sadly, can’t produce much more than a flatter, dimmer, more one-dimensional tone.

And, because box colour fades much faster than salon-grade products, using it on your roots can result in some noticeable colour banding. When the coverage attempt quickly washes out to a paler hue, it’ll clash with the longer-lasting richness we created when you last paid us a visit.

Free online hair care advice

I, salon director Liam Fry, am excited to continue offering free remote videochat sessions over Skype, FaceTime, etc. to answer any questions you might have about taking care of your hair from home! Or, if you just need someone to talk to about non-hair stuff during these weeks and months of exhausting isolation, I’m here for you for that too.

Just pop over to the Tony Wood Hair page on Facebook and send us a message requesting a chat, and I’ll get a call appointed for you as soon as possible!

Much love, and hope to see you all again soon,

— Liam