Why is brassy hair bad?

September 16, 2021 7:01 PM

Why is brassy hair considered bad?

I have been bleaching/dyeing my hair to blonde since the start of 2020. Currently a pink ombre: hair tax.

The internet is covered with articles about how to prevent, hide, cure, and eradicate brassy hair. I do not understand why this is so, or what the negative connotation of brassy hair might be. I have occasionally looked for answers online but have not yet found them.

My hair coloring PoV background is anime & punk rock, from which I have adopted the aesthetic that basically any color of hair can be neat, fun, and cool. I do not anticipate changing this but I seek a understanding of why other people view brassy hair negatively.

posted by glonous keming to Clothing, Beauty, & Fashion (23 answers total)

This could be an anachronism based on the late 20th century desire to have a “natural “ blond tone, which was considered more ashey tone, or silvery.
posted by waving at 7:07 PM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

1. Unwanted warm undertones are a common way for hair coloring to go wrong, so it gets a lot of attention.

2. White supremacy. "Blonde" as an aspirational thing is a white supremacist thing, and the ideal white supremacist blonde is the cool, pale blonde.

(Note: plenty of people want to avoid brassy tones in their hair for non-racist reasons. The fact that the concept of blondness is related to white supremacy is not an attack on anyone's personal feelings about their hair color!)
posted by the primroses were over at 7:15 PM on September 16, 2021 [6 favorites]

There's definitely some class-based undertones here where "brassy" suggests a cheap at-home dye job rather than a professional salon job (which would presumably be indistinguishable from "natural" hair.)

Now that hair dyeing isn't quite so scandalous, generally speaking the "brassy" is usually considered "bad" because it's seldom the target color--usually it's the failure mode of a different color a person was going for. It's also a warm tone that isn't universally flattering to peoples' skin/eye coloring, so it can leave someone's face looking washed out.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:18 PM on September 16, 2021 [25 favorites]

Fundamentally? Because less-brassy bleach jobs are often salon jobs and therefore more expensive and therefore more of a class marker, also because "brassy" hair itself is a class marker.

Technically a brassy bleach might be harder on your hair because you presumably are using harsher drugstore color and not using toning agents, etc, so in theory people might deprecate it because it messes up your hair texture.

But really, it's because it is associated with poor people and as good Americans we know that looking poor, especially when women look poor, is very bad indeed.
posted by Frowner at 7:18 PM on September 16, 2021 [16 favorites]

(FWIW while brassy hair is typically associated with blondes, just about any hair color that mimics "natural" shades can turn toward the orangey spectrum, especially if your hair is already processed in some way. Reds especially can go wonky in unexpected ways!)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:21 PM on September 16, 2021

My hair coloring PoV background is anime & punk rock

A lot of people who don't like brassy hair would also not be caught dead wearing anything anime or punk rock. So that's probably another area of class/style/aesthetic difference.

Your hair looks amazing, btw.
posted by brook horse at 7:29 PM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

Red hair has been the subject of all kinds of wild myths and prejudices forever, and in the early decades of commercial hair dye it was common to end up with red undertones (because of the orange stage of bleaching, and the red base in many hair colors) and that was considered bad.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:40 PM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

I feel like there's no accounting for taste? That's just not the color they were going for. They want it to be the other color.
posted by bleep at 8:14 PM on September 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Brassy refers to an unwanted unflattering unexpected tonal result, or rusty after effect of old dye fading. You wanted bold warm brown but got a weak dull brass. Your prized rose gold money piece was perfect for a week then faded to an orangey stripe that washes you out.

It does not mean that everyone hates intentionally golden, red, copper, orange, etc tones. In fact those are and have been quite stylish, even among people who spend a lot at salons. “Punk” hair has been mainstream for decades so this is not normies vs cool kids.
posted by kapers at 8:38 PM on September 16, 2021 [15 favorites]

To build on other people's answers, brassiness (in its negative meaning) means you still have enough red pigments left behind in your follicles. If you didn't plan for this it means you haven't completely reached the level of lift/lightening that you wanted. This impacts your end colour which is often not a consideration but it'll show up in your final look.

Cool tones for light hair also is very high-maintenance, in part because it's achieved with blue pigments, which is often the first thing to go once you resume your regular hairwashing schedule. But just in general, the cooler/bluer part of your colour will be the first to fade, due to the nature of those pigments, which then shows up as eventual orange/red ie brassiness. So a lot of the post-salon at-home products is just variations of trying to temporarily restore the level of blue/cool tones before your next colour service, hence the array of purple shampoos for example.

And even if warm/golden colours are your goal, the eventual 'brassiness' will still happen because of that fading i mentioned. Though with more reds or golds colours, you might not go for purple shampoos/toners but more explicitly red/yellow ones.
posted by cendawanita at 9:23 PM on September 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

Brassy is easy to get - it’s an intermediate step when you bleach out the blue pigment in your hair leaving behind red + yellow = orange, and all bleached hair will eventually fade back to an orangey yellow colour.

Ashy is hard to get - It requires a careful application of blue / purple, in a proportion that matches the amount of red / yellow / orange in the hair. And the ashy blue tones fade faster so the orange brass shows again unless you maintain the ash.

Darker hair goes very brassy orange when lightened (lighter hair goes yellow instead of orange). That brassy dark orangr colour requires a lot more work, product, money, steps, time, maintenance, and expertise, to get it to a cool light ashy colour. So brassy is the colour that non-WASP racialized people with natural dark hair are more likely to get with a cheaper dye job.

Brassy is fast and easy and cheap as it requires just one step (bleaching) and more expensive procedures will revert to brass when they fade.

Ashy hair takes longer and is harder and more expensive, as it requires more procedures (bleaching, then adding toner) and had an expert touch to calibrate the colour blend.

For all these reasons - money, effort, and, yep, racism - ash is a class marker.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 9:39 PM on September 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

I was the first to use "brassy" on the other hair dye post, and yes I meant it in the sense of it being a common failure mode when going for blonde. If it helps, my hair is currently hennaed to a warm brown with a crimson undertone, and I love the way it flashes red in the sun.

FYI, Poland is like 99% white, women predominantly have mousy brown Slavic hair so like 80% of them dye it, and there's still a perception that brassy as blonde failure mode is very distinct from red (which is quite a popular colour, including tones that definitely don't appear in nature), without a racial background to it. I think it doesn't help that particular pale orange you get from misapplied box dye is really hard to pull off looking good.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:29 PM on September 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

"Brassy" comes across as "fake" if someone is trying to go for a more natural hair color. Since you're rocking pink hair - which is already not a genetic standard for our species - this may not be a concern.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:04 AM on September 17, 2021

My first salon color, as a teenager, came out "brassy". I thought it looked great. My mother marched me back in there to get it sorted out with toner. I realized much later that what she meant was, as said above, it looked *obviously* dyed, and perhaps poorly. In the area where I grew up that sort of thing mattered, socially.

I still think it looked fine and in any of the dye jobs I've had done as an adult, professional or DIY, I've never given a single fuck nor has anyone ever commented. Currently my hair is purple. (Yes, she hates it.) But I no longer travel in circles where brassy = bad.
posted by Stacey at 5:16 AM on September 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

A more yellow/orange color is harder to coordinate with other colors, and might make adding another color harder - if you wanted a cool red or a blue, you could end up with orange or green.

Also, many people avoid yellow (e.g. clothes) near their skin because they think it makes their skin tones look unfortunate.
posted by amtho at 5:54 AM on September 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also, if you're walking around with brassy hair, you clearly either don't understand or don't subscribe to normal American values around race, money and propriety. Being oblivious to propriety is embarrassing for you and causes secondhand embarrassment in others. Not caring about propriety is bad and wrong and a sign that there is something bad and wrong about you. Choosing to wear brassy hair is noncompliant, like wearing "trashy" clothes, women wearing clothes that don't "flatter" their figures, men wearing insufficiently masculine clothes, etc.

I mean, there are other reasons not to want a brassy bleach - I bleached my hair all the time when I was young and fun, and sometimes I liked a really bright, sunny bleach job and other times I wanted it to be cooler. Honestly, "brassy" looks better on me than a really pale ash.
posted by Frowner at 6:29 AM on September 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

Another case in which brassy is undesirable -- I have (naturally, haha) grey hair, and I don't want it to be a different color on the ends than at the roots -- I want it to be equally silver. Sometimes it gets a beige/"brassy" tinge at the ends, maybe due to product buildup? I get concerned that it looks unkempt or dirty, and it definitely doesn't look deliberate, so I use a purple toner to get rid of it.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:58 AM on September 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Brassy is a term that comes from the early 1900's when dying hair was beginning to be come acceptable in middle class circles. Back then it was the term used to mean you could tell that her hair had been dyed. It was associated with "unwomanly" behaviour such as leaving the domestic sphere, speaking up, working for your living, sex outside of marriage, dating, necking, associating with ineligible men and intruding into masculine circles. Not all those connotations have worn off despite a century have passed since the brassy blonde was a stock character for the female antagonist in the latest talkie. A related term is floozy.

See also the term "suicide blonde" - dyed by her own hand.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:59 AM on September 17, 2021 [6 favorites]

“Brassy” hair means your hair is closer to straight up “yellow” instead of “blonde”, and most people think that yellow hair is sort of objectively unflattering to most skin tones. If you like the way it looks, go for it.
posted by cakelite at 8:27 AM on September 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

When white fibers (textiles, fur, wood) are yellowed, it's usually because of buildup of some kind of oil. This is probably why white became so prestigious in the first place: people associate it with cleanliness, which is something that rich people can achieve more easily.
posted by amtho at 9:38 AM on September 17, 2021

This really hearkens back to an era in which hair dye was still Not Socially Acceptable at all. See this commercial from a famous, long-running campaign by Miss Clairol with the slogan "Does she or doesn't she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure."

The effects of early hair dyes were relatively obvious, unnatural, and crude compared to those that came later, and brassy tones were one of the effects associated with those early processes. To use such a patently false, crude product carried the implication that one was likewise crude oneself.

So Clairol telling women that they could dye their hair unnoticeably and not experience the social opprobrium previously associated with it was a big deal.

While ideas about dyeing other colors have faded, natural blonde hair's relative rarity in adulthood means it is especially esteemed. So "failing" at blonde still carries a freight that other hair colors don't.

[NB: In 1988, the summer between seventh and eighth grade for me, my best friend and I, knowing hydrogen peroxide was the active ingredient in Sun-In, dumped straight peroxide on our hair and went to lay out. She, a brunette, ended up with mild lightening. My childhood blonde was in the process of fading to a mousy brown, and the peroxide gave me a brilliant brass color I was thrilled with. My mom let me go on with it, and through the remainder of high school I regularly lightened it with Nice & Easy 98B, a very light blonde. The common nickname for Nice & Easy was "Nice & Sleazy," another example of the implications dyed hair carried.]
posted by jocelmeow at 10:59 AM on September 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

From the obit of the mind behind that slogan:

Shirley Polykoff, the pioneering advertising woman who came up with a single double-entendre that changed the face, or rather turned the heads, of American society, died on Thursday at her home on Park Avenue. She was 90 and the author of the ''Does she . . . or doesn't she?'' slogan, which unleashed American women to choose the color of their hair.

In an era when hair color is no longer a fiat of nature but a routine fashion choice, it is easy to forget that as recently as the mid-1950's hair coloring was such an exotic exception to a cultural norm that only 7 percent of American women dared dye their hair, mainly actresses, models and other fast women.

Then in 1956 Miss Polykoff invented the ''Does she . . . or doesn't she?'' campaign for a tiny Bristol-Myers division known as Clairol. Almost overnight, the slogan became a national catch phrase, and dyed hair (although never thereafter, she made sure, known that way) went from declasse to de rigueur.

Attracted by the slogan and its reassuring tag line, ''Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure,'' within a decade nearly half of all American women were regularly coloring their hair, and sales of dyes, tints and rinses had soared from $25 million to $200 million a year, with Clairol accounting for more than half the total (as it does today with industry sales of more than $1 billion).

posted by jocelmeow at 11:11 AM on September 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

I never really thought much about this myself but growing up I was a natural blonde. My sister hated that I got complimented on it so she began to call me "Brass Door Knob Head" all the time as an insult.
posted by maxg94 at 5:33 PM on September 18, 2021