Color Theory contains the basics of understanding color. It explores all aspects of color and how color works. It is really all about how we can apply color and for artists, that is essential knowledge. Colors can affect us on an emotional and even physical level. We have very strong attachments to color as a society, and yet these associations can vary drastically culture to culture. For this post, I will focus on the standard western color associations.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BLUE AND PURPLE SHAMPOO?
Blue shampoo and purple shampoo help remove brassiness from different shades of hair. Learn which type of shampoo is best for your hair color!
Brassiness is the ultimate nemesis of color-treated hair. Whether you go for a platinum blonde dye job or a few subtle highlights, your color-treated locks will undoubtedly show some brassy yellow, red, or orange tones at some point.
That’s where blue and purple shampoo come in. What are blue and purple shampoo, you ask? Here’s everything you need to know about blue vs. purple shampoo and when to use them.
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WHAT IS BLUE SHAMPOO?
Both blue and purple shampoos are used to color-correct dyed or lightened hair. You may be familiar with purple shampoo, which counteracts the yellow tones that create a brassy look in color-treated blonde hair. Blue shampoo achieves a similar purpose but for brunette hair.
After a month or so of shampooing, heat-styling, and sun exposure, that gorgeous color you left the salon with often begins to fade. What you’re left with are the brassy undertones. For blonde hair, those undertones will often be somewhere between yellow and oranage while for brunette hair, they will be somewhere between orange to a coppery red.
Blue shampoos are designed to counteract orange tones in brunette hair, while purple shampoos are used to banish brass in blonde hair. If you make the leap from brunette to blonde hair, make sure to switch to a purple shampoo to counteract the yellow tones that often appear in color-treated blonde hair.
Blue shampoos are designed to counteract orange tones in brunette hair, while purple shampoos are used to banish brass in blonde hair.
BLUE VS. PURPLE SHAMPOO: WHICH ONE SHOULD I USE?
You know why to use blue or purple shampoo, but how do you know which one to use? The answer lies in the color wheel.
Shades of yellow and even light orange sit directly across from purple and violet hues on the color wheel. This means purple cancels out yellow. Seeing bright yellow where your cool blonde highlights used to be? A purple shampoo can help restore your color to cool blonde magnificence once again.
Orange and red hues, on the other hand, are opposite blue on the color wheel. This means—you guessed it!—blue cancels out orange. So if your brunette locks are suddenly showing a garish orange or even a dull coppery red, using a blue shampoo a blue shampoo can tone them back to brilliant brown.
You Are Wrong!
Forget everything you think you know about color! And I mean everything. You are probably wrong unless you have studied Color Theory. Even the basics you were taught are probably incorrect. We teach children, and many adults, that the primary colors are Red, Yellow, and Blue, but they aren’t. Not really.
You might remember the name Roy G Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet), but this is actually inaccurate when naming the colors. For some reason, this mnemonic device has no room for cyan, while indigo and violet are both present even though they are virtually the same. I think it confuses cyan with blue, and confuses indigo as blue. Orange is really just a tertiary color between yellow and red, but there’s a slot for that as well. Allow me to explain.
These colors (red, yellow, blue) are often referred to as the Painter’s Color Wheel, because painters for generations would use these colors in paint, mixing them to get other colors. This is partially due to the limitations of color reproduction technology, and the way pigments mix.
Let Me Explain
Paints use materials with various properties to portray different colors. They have different parts to them (such as binding agents) which can affect the way they reflect light. Further, the way pigments reflect color is different from the way the color of light itself works. Since we see color through light receptors in our eyes, we see colors differently than the way paint mixes. So even when we see pigments of paint, we are really seeing the colors of reflected light off of pigment, resin, solvent, and additives.
Film and monitors use light to portray images, not pigments. Therefore, their colors are more technically accurate to our eyes(although they too have limitations and issues which will be discussed in later posts.)
The Pigment Color Wheel, CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black), is usually used for ink and printing. It is a very accurate color wheel like the light color wheel, and is actually closely related to it. The Pigment Color Wheel has it’s own uses and limitations, but we can go more into that one later.
Values of the Color Wheels
That isn’t to say these other color wheels don’t have their place. If you work with pigments and paints, these color wheels are invaluable to determine how reflected light off pigments will change colors when mixed. These types of color wheels usually work with color pencil, ink, paint, pastels, and other subtractive color mediums. These wheels are really tools artists use across various mediums to get the colors they want. We see the color of light. The goal is to mimic it.
Red, Green, and Blue are the basic colors in light and therefore film. The secondary colors, Yellow, Cyan, and Magenta, are combinations of these. You can mix tertiary colors (orange, violet, etc) and all other colors from there as well.
As you can see from the image above, mixing the true primary colors of light will produce the secondary colors, which strongly resembles the Pigment Color Wheel, and all the colors make combined white. In pigments, the opposite is true, combining all colors makes black, or at least a very dark muddy grayish neutral color. For light, the brightness of the light will determine how dark or light the colors are and how much colors mix, making black a mere absence of light. When mixing all the colors produces black, it is a subtractive color wheel, and when they produce white, it is an additive color wheel.
