5 blue shampoos that keep my lightened brown hair from looking brassy

Honestly, this is my favorite pick of the bunch because the formula helps lock in the cooler hues of my dye job longer than any other shampoo I've tried.

Fanola is especially effective when maintaining on all-over dye jobs, like mine. Just make sure that you blend it through every inch of your hair, or you may end up with uneven toning — yeah, it's that strong.

My biggest piece of advice though is to wear gloves. Fanola's formula is not for the faint of heart — or bare hands. I made this rookie mistake when I was in a bit of a rush one day and forgot my plastic gloves. Your hands will not only be left with an alien-esque purple-blue tint, but the color will also linger around your nail beds and cuticles.

Everything will wash off after some time, but save yourself from my mistake and just remember to wear plastic gloves before using.

The deep-blue pigments in dpHUE's formula work to neutralize unwanted red, orange tones in my wavy, dyed hair while silk proteins soften and prevent breakage. Best of all, it's a use-as-needed shampoo, so I can still use my favorite everyday shampoo and switch to dpHUE when I start noticing a few brassy strands pop up.

The biggest con is that at $26 for an 8.5-ounce bottle, this kind of result doesn't come cheap. I will say this though — while my wallet doesn't not appreciate the hefty price, my hair loves the results whenever I use it.

With more than 340 5-star reviews on Amazon, it's hard to ignore this shampoo from Joico. The fan favorite contains tone-correcting pigments that latch onto hair fibers and stays attached even through multiple washes.

I had zero qualms about Joico's shampoo when I had highlighted brown hair. However, when I took the plunge to all-over lightened hair, I didn't see the same results.

Brassy sections kept popping up a few areas, which was something I never saw when I had highlighted hair. In my experience, this shampoo is great for partially dyed or highlighted hair, but doesn't deliver the same results for all-over dyed hair. If your dye job falls in the latter, I'd recommend any of the stronger, more potent formulas like the Fanola No Orange Shampoo.

After being a dedicated Aveda user for many years, I was super stoked to discover that there was a shampoo for my newly-lightened hair.

With its plant-based ingredients, this shampoo has a gentler approach to removing brassiness; it uses ylang ylang, lemon, eucalyptus, and other pure botanical essences in its formula.

However, I found this soothing blend a little too gentle when it came to taming brassy tones. Sure, it smelled heavenly and left my hair playfully soft, but warm caramel and yellow strands were still popping up despite my daily use of this shampoo.

You might have a different experience with it depending on how light your hair is and your natural texture, but for me, I realized I needed to sacrifice to a few natural ingredients in order to find one that really delivered the results I was looking for.

This professional salon shampoo utilizes balancing blue-violet pigments to neutralize brassy tones while adding in cooler tones. I was pretty excited to try this shampoo because I had heard many great things about Matrix. The brand is constantly associated with salons and pro results, so at $14 a bottle, it really is a bargain for such a specialty shampoo.

The downside to this shampoo, however, is that it left my scalp a little dry and my hair lost quite a bit of its softness. Of course, this is from personal experience and everyone's hair reacts differently to certain products, but given my extensive dyeing history and testing of blue shampoos, I wouldn't be surprised if my hair just decided to rebel on this shampoo.

I ended up doubling down on my deep conditioner, which eventually fixed the dryness problem. Color-wise, this shampoo did manage to keep the brassiness away from my hair, so it's kind of a double-edged sword.