While changing your hair can be a lot of fun, it can also be very damaging. As someone who loves to experiment with my mane, I spent many years dying my hair a variety of colors before realizing the damage that the harsh chemicals were causing. If you want to protect your hair but don’t want to stop playing around, natural dyes are a great option. Dyes have always been readily available in nature, from plants to herbs, people for thousands of years before us were using what was available around them to get the dyes they want. While technology has given us a lot of great things, new does not always equal better, and when it comes to the health of our bodies, it’s sometimes best to take a page from those who came before us and use natural solutions to get what we want.

Henna
Henna isn’t just good for beautiful temporary tattooing, it also makes a great dye for red shades. It might be kind of tricky to get the exact shade you want, as it can sometimes take days for the color to really settle in, but it’s a great alternative to chemical dyes. It even works on blonde and gray hair, and you can get a great variety of shades, with darker reds coming through the longer you leave it on your hair.

Indigo Powder
Sometimes referred to as ‘Black Henna,’ indigo powder can give a great blue-black color to your hair. Though it comes from the indigo plant and isn’t actually henna, indigo powder is often used with henna, hence the nickname. It’s sometimes recommended to use henna before using indigo powder so that the color sticks better, or you can mix the two together to get auburn or brown colors.

Lemon
Using lemon is a great way to lighten your hair as a natural alternative to bleach or other harmful lightening chemicals. Though it’s not powerful enough to take dark hair to blonde hair, spraying some freshly squeezed lemon juice and your hair and brushing it through before sitting in the sun can bring out natural highlights and take dark blonde hair to a much brighter color. It won’t completely dye your hair, but it does make a wonderful lightener, and if worst comes to worst and it doesn’t make a difference in your hair, at least you haven’t done any harm to it!

So next time you’re thinking of trying something new with your hair, skip the trip to the hair salon and try out these natural alternatives instead!