How to Dye Your Hair with Coffee

Coffee is secretly a super versatile and incredibly effective all-natural beauty ingredient. The grounds can be used as a gentle exfoliator, and the caffeine in coffee, when used as an ingredient in a mask, can invigorate your skin and help fight sagging skin. But coffee isn't just good for skincare, and people on the internet have been experimenting with using coffee as an all-natural hair dye for years. You can dye your hair with Kool-Aid, after all, and dying your hair with coffee is kind of the same basic principle. It's way cheaper than buying bottles conventional hair dye or getting your color touched up in a salon, and you're not even using any harsh chemicals.

In fact, learning how to dye hair with coffee is fairly easy, and you don't really need a lot of equipment or products. Simply brew a couple of cups of dark coffee or espresso, using twice the amount of coffee grounds you'd use for a regular batch. Let the coffee cool, then mix the coffee with conditioner, apply to your hair as you would any store-bought hair dye, and let it sit for at least an hour. Rinse the mixture out of your hair, and theoretically, you'll be left with darker hued locks than before.

There are plenty of success stories and tutorials on Pinterest. Some folks even add some cocoa powder to make the dye extra dark.

But when you watch tutorials on YouTube, dying your hair naturally with coffee seems to be a much messier process than described.

Professional hair colorists are skeptical about this DIY trend, though. As Rita Hazan, celebrity colorist and owner of Rita Hazan Salon, told POPSUGAR, using coffee as dye on blonde hair will result in "a muddy color." And it's definitely not dark enough to really deepen the color of brown hair, explains Christine Thompson, master colorist and cofounder of Spoke & Weal salons.

But this DIY coffee hair dye is only ever going to be temporary, so if you're really looking for a quick, cheap, and natural way to change up your look, there's no real reason not to take your favorite breakfast beverage into the bathroom, and give it a shot. Just be sure to have a couple of towels ready.