Green hair is common in blond swimmers everywhere. Even if you have taken pains to hide it beneath a swim cap or soak it in a home-made wash beforehand, blond hair can still turns up green after swimming. The green comes from the copper used in algaecide, a common pool chemical, and it leeches into blond hair after even the briefest encounters. There are lots of products available to treat this, but they fall into three categories.
Commercial Products
There are a multitude of commercial products available to treat "swimmer's hair," ranging from those that only treat the green tint to those that deal with the side effects of chlorine and chemicals. If you are using it simply to treat the green, stay with the shampoos that treat the condition specifically. If you are an avid swimmer, or if green hair is an ongoing problem, you might want to check out the more comprehensive products. Stay away from products that promise to tint your hair back to normal color, these usually only mask the green and it will come back after the product wears off.
Home-made Washes
Using tomato juice as a shampoo is one of the cheapest and effective remedies out there. Use a liberal amount and massage it into the hair and scalp and leave for 5-10 minutes. You can then wash it out and condition as normal. Some of the home remedies out there are as harmful as they are helpful, so watch out and use common sense. Lemon juice is one of these, and bleaches as well as strips the hair. While the blond color will return, the hair is now more prone to damage and turning green upon further contact with pool water.
Prevention
Preventing green hair from becoming a problem is, in many ways, preferable to treating it. Using a leave-in conditioner immediately before entering the pool works very well on shorter hair, but is not the best solution for longer hair. Some hair salons offer something called a "seal coat" or a "gloss coat" that seals many cuticles on the hair, which prevents the copper from attaching in the first place. A similar home treatment would be the "hot oil" treatments available from many drug stores. Using a combination of one of these treatments and soaking the hair thoroughly before entering the pool greatly reduces the amount of green tint that will show up in your hair. If all else fails, you can still don a swim cap.
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