La Riche Directions | White Toner

I previously tried and reviewed the Bleach London White Toner (you can find my review here), in my battle to get whiter, less brassy coloured hair. The results weren’t exactly what I was hoping for, so I decided to try out something else. I’d read really good reviews about the La Riche Directions White Toner and I used to use the dye pots previously to maintain my bright red hair, which I rated quite highly.

Luckily there is a little store in the shopping centre near me that sells the La Riche Direction hair pots, as well as Stargazer and Crazy Colour dyes; also known for their offerings of rainbow coloured hair products. I picked up a couple of the White Toner pots from here for just £3.50 each, which I thought was a complete bargain but you can get it for just under £3 if you look in the right places! If you don’t have anywhere local to pick them up you can buy them online very easily.

These are super simple to use, as opposed to the Bleach London toner which required mixing like a dye; the Directions pots are ready to go as they are. Although because they are quite basic they don’t come with any extras, so you might need to buy some disposable gloves to apply. I had some lying around from previous boxes of dye so I popped those on. The toner is to be applied to towel-dried hair after a wash with PH-balanced shampoo and left on for around fifteen minutes.

I had read online that many people prefer to leave it on for longer than the 15 to get a stronger result, and as there is no peroxide in this, it shouldn’t damage your hair any more the longer you leave it on. I applied it all over and then left to develop for a rebellious thirty minutes before washing out. The toner is a lilacy hue before application, to counter the yellow tones in your hair. As I left if for a while I did get excited as I could see the colour changing on my hair; some bits looked white/silver and some bits looked a pale lilac shade. Please excuse the low quality images from my shoddy Samsung (which make my hair look a little similar to octopus tentacles).

These are the results after drying (left) and the next morning (right). The lighting is pretty awful in my apartment, but you can definitely see the silvery tones running through the ends where my hair was much lighter.

After being disappointed by my previous toner adventures, I was actually really pleased with the results from this one. It does state that it is a ‘conditioning’ hair colour, as do all of the colours from Directions, and my hair did feel soft and conditioned after use. My hair was definitely lighter, and more noticeably the white/silver colour I was trying to achieve. Win! It’s also easy to apply and only took me one pot to cover my entire head. The only downside in my opinion is that as it’s only semi-permanent it may fade after a few weeks, but you can maintain the silver/white colours by adding some of this to your shampoo once a week, as well as using special silver/violet shampoos and conditioners which are now really easy to get hold of due to the silver hair trend becoming so big recently.

Overall I would highly recommend this product, great value, great results and didn’t seem to damage my hair at all. I went from all blonde to having definite silvery tones running through the ends and this was by far the product that helped the most.

Have you tried any of the La Riche products?

LL x