So, what you’re looking at is are readouts from a device called the Hunter Spectrophotometer.
The Hunter Spec. (for short) measures light transmission and light absorption or what we call depth.
It also measures chromatic purity or what we refer to as tone.
So a shade is dyed out on 100% white hair and then the swatch is inserted into the machine
and it digitally analyzes the shade and places it somewhere on this grid.
The grid is laid out simple—on the left you see the measurements from light to dark and on the bottom you see the chromatic measurements from cool to warm.
So, in a perfect world we would all assume that a brand of haircolor would essentially line up perfectly on this grid right?!?
All the level 6’s should line up from coolest to warmest and the level 8’s, etc…
However you can see here, that this is not necessarily the case.
Now this isn’t about all of us getting crazy and saying how bad these haircolor lines are.
These are both readouts from lines that are very popular and big sellers in the professional market and they sell lot of haircolor and make a lot of money.
However this is just the reality of what we’re dealing with.
How many of you have used a shade of haircolor and gotten an end result that you didn’t predict was going to happen?
Too dark?
Too light?
Not enough tone?
Too much tone?
Not the expected tone?
I know its happened to me once or twice. And after it happened I was always like:
“I hate that shade and I’m never going to use it again”.
Now, I want to close this out with this:
The word calibrated gets thrown out a lot in the world of haircolor.
People who work in marketing departments of haircolor brands ESPECIALLY love this word because the word itself sounds so scientific right?!? It even instills a little confidence, no?
“Such and such line of haircolor is calibrated for maximum results”
Well, guess what friends
Calibrated means:
“Measured and marked with a standard scale of readings”
So what are we looking at here on these grids are haircolor lines that have been measured and marked with a standard scale of readings.
You’re looking at “calibrated haircolor lines”.
Worth investigating. Use to mean a mathematical equation when you needed to make a hair color pigment you may not have in stock. For example : you were out of 8N and you had 9N and 7N so you mixed the two pigments 1/2 and 1/2 to make an 8N. That’s what I understood to be a calibrated color system. I welcome your input to this train of though.