The great thing about lightening your hair with honey is that your hair suffers no damage. The bad thing about lightening your hair with honey is that results appear slowly. You need multiple applications to get a deeper, brighter appearance — and then your hair starts growing again, and you have a whole new batch of dark hair to light.
Sitting with hair “dripping” wet for over an hour is not a fun or practical way to spend an hour.
While experimenting on my own, I’ve come up with a few tweaks to ensure your hair gets a daily boost of a honey’s peroxide enhancing benefits.
NOTE: Please see this original post with all of the details about how long to let the honey sit to activate the peroxide, along with ratios of water to honey.
Lighten Hair While You Deep Condition: Honey’s peroxide is activated in water — but there is also quite a bit of water in your favorite daily, leave-in conditioner or deep conditioner. So, instead of saturating the honey in water, simply saturate and active the peroxide in honey by mixing it with your favorite conditioner. Leave your conditioner/honey mask on your hair, wrapped in a shower cap for an hour, or overnight. No more drips and honey is still doing its job.
Using Honey as a Leave-In Styling Gel: Honey activates curly hair to create defined curls, that are resistant to frizz. Remember, once you dilute honey with water, the honey becomes less “sticky” while the water helps to release the peroxide in the honey. Cosmetic manufacturers have already discovered the value of using honey to release and define curls and have created an abundance of honey hair care products. So, DIY your own honey mask. Experiment by adding honey to your favorite leave-in, or mixing it with your favorite hair gel. A little honey goes a long way toward lightening your hair.
DIY Honey Hair Gel: Have you tried making your own flax seed gel, or oatmeal gel? You’ll be amazed at the holding power. There are tons of how-to videos, with people adding oils, creams, and botanicals. Add honey for super styling/holding power. I will never go back to any other hair gel! Moisturizing and soft.
Use Peroxide-Boosting Spices: Adding cinnamon (could burn our scalp), cardamon, cloves, nutmeg can enhance cinnamon’s lightning power. So add these spices to any of your DIY mixes!
Another note: For the most potent peroxide impact, I would add the honey for each use, rather than mixing a bottle in advance. Research shows the honey peroxide is only active for an hour…
Hi, I hope I’m not too late for asking questions on this old post.
I just did the drippy version and wow that was drippy, I only did the ends and still was an adventure that I don’t really want to repeat but I’m still glad I did it at least once!
I want to try the leave in conditioner version next, but do I use the same amount of conditioner in place of water?
3/4th cup and 2 tablespoon honey?
Do I still mix in the cardamom and olive oil? The olive oil washes out of my hair well, not sure if that changes if I use it too often though.
Then do I just wash it after the hour or so, or can I redo another leave-in mixture and re-apply on top of the leave in already there or should I wash, let it dry a while, then add it again? My hair takes forever to dry, but i also don’t use a hair dryer on it, could always sit in front of the fan to speed things up lol
I’m sorry for all the questions, I just want to be sure I fully understand before I do this. I’ve limited energy due to chronic illnesses and what I did today really zapped more energy out of me than I expected!
My bottle of leave in conditioner (I have I think an 8 or 4 oz bottle of a carol’s daughter type) doesn’t really tell me exactly the ratios but water is listed first so that seems good.