Review: L'Oreal Feria Pure Scarlet Power

In a bid to save a bit of money this month, I decided to give up my monthly visit to the hairdresser, and try out a home hair colourant instead. I've been colouring my hair various shades of red for about 10 years - the last time I coloured it myself, I used L'Oreal Feria. So I decided to stick with what I know and use Feria again, in the Pure Scarlet Power shade; an intense red that looked most similar to the hairdresser-given colour I usually have.

The application process is much the same as any at home colourant I've used; a colour gel is added to a developer and then given a good shake. Feria adds an additional "colour booster", which in this case was an intense red liquid. Once the colour was mixed, it was fairly easy to apply to the roots of my hair, as the bottle nozzle is rather fine, allowing you to get right into the roots.

I used two boxes of colour on my thick, bra strap length hair, and found that the two boxes worth of dye fully saturated my hair. The dye has the usual chemical smell, which I did my best to ignore for the 30 minute development time. It took a long time to rinse the colour out; I spent a good 20 minutes bent over the bath rinsing and washing my hair out with the shampoo provided. My hair was left feeling fairly dry and coarse, and a big dollop of intensive conditioner was needed to smooth it out again.

The colour I ended up with it not the colour on the box. It's much darker, verging on a dark plum shade which glows red in bright light. I'm expecting it to fade down to a more box-like colour in a week or so, but overall I'm disappointed at the darkness of the initial colour, given that my hair was light red when I started out.

Pros: easy to apply, plenty of shampoo provided in the box, great quality gloves, gives great shine
Cons: much darker colour than expected, drying

All in all, worth trying if you're looking for shiny colour with a bit of an edge - but don't expect it to be as bright as the box shade.

L'Oreal Feria home hair colour, £5.67 at Superdrug.