Honey & Cinnamon to Lighten my Hair

I did an experiment this week: using honey and cinnamon to change my hair color. I have read a lot about women doing this and having success with it. So, I wanted to try it out. I haven't colored my hair in about two years, but oh how I LOVE hair color. Before that, I was getting highlights annually. I would get them right before the summer time, but only did it annually because I knew it was bad for my hair and I loved the way my hair looked as they grew out. However, after my stylist put highlights in it the last time, she [low-key] didn't want to do it anymore! Lol it's actually funny because she would do stuff like buy rinses for my hair instead of restocking the hair color I wanted since she didn't want to do it. Finally, she admitted she thought my hair was doing so well that she didn't want to ruin it by coloring it again. I couldn't argue against that of course.

Anywhooo... back to the subject at hand. After reseaching why these two household items are chosen to lighten you hair color, I found out that honey contains trace amounts of hydrogen perioxide. *gasp* I seriously didn't know that ya'll! Cinnamon acts as a peroxide activator, as does lemon juice, which I also used. So there you have color change in your kitchen! Not to mention all the benefits honey is known to have for hair. Now, as I said trace amounts, that means slight results. You are not about to have serious results from this, especially if your hair is dark. My hair is black, but my hope was in boosting my color treated ends. They were beginning to look dull to me and I just refuse to do damage to my hair with color when I haven't even reached a goal with it yet!

So, I looked over a number of recipes for doing this and decided on combining two. I'm not the best at following directions with recipes, as in I like to put my own twist on pretty much everything. I used:

•  1/2 cup of honey
• 1 heaping tablespoon of cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons of lemon juice

When I say I messed up this time, I mean I messed up! Fortunately for me, it was not to the detriment of the whole experiment. Since the honey was so very thick and slow (it was honey after all), I decided to warm it up a little. A little was too much and it got so liquidy, never congealing again. Ugh. Way to make an already messy situation even messier. Once I had a bowl of this liquid magic, I thought to myself maybe if I add some conditioner it will help thicken it up some. Ha! The conditioner floated in that stuff *shaking my head* 


I ended up having to use a relaxer brush to apply the liquid mixture to my strands. I didn't go all the way to my roots because I wasn't sure about how my scalp would feel with cinnamon on it overnight. After applying it where I wanted, I put a plastic cap and scarf on, leaving it on overnight. I attempted to rinse with conditioner to get all the cinnamon out, but it was as if my hair just laughed at that. So I have to do a few lathers of shampoo before I felt it was actually clean. Here are my results:

my color before (without & with flash)

my color after (sorry for the weird glare)

 It worked! I need to take some more before/after pics because I feel like these have a weird glare or something on them. But my hair color definitely got brighter. I thought it was quite cool to see it work the way people claimed. If I were to try this again, I would use raw honey, not warm it, and a lemon instead of lemon juice from concentrate.

Lessons learned:

1. honey and cinnamon will lighten/brighten your hair color
2. sometimes, you should just follow the directions. That's what they're there for anyway.

15 comments hair color, hair experiment, hair lightening, honey and cinnamon

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