Cancel your colorist appointment: You can do root touch-ups at home with this powder

I don’t actually know if I have gray hair on my head or, perhaps more disturbingly—what my natural hair color looks like. Why? I’m a certifiable root denier who visits the salon frequently enough to maintain consistent uniformity of an unnatural-past-childhood blonde. I’m so addicted to root touch-ups, in fact, that often my colorist, grateful though she is for my business, will say, “You could probably wait a bit longer to see me next time.” I always ignore this advice to the detriment of my free time on Saturdays, and my bank account. Fortunately, there’s an actually efficacious root touch-up powder made by the colorists at Goldwell which requires almost no precision or DIY adeptness.

“I am all too familiar with needing a root blender to disguise my grays in between color service,” says Adara Forletta, a 28-year-old colorist at Mare Salon in Los Angeles. She has stubborn grays that congregate around the front of her head. The Goldwell Dualsenses Revive Root Retouch Powder ($20) works wonders, she tells me. “It’ sure to give you the coverage you need without being too sticky. It’s easy to blend and looks super natural.”

The magic-making, salon-bucks-saving powder comes in five shades: light blonde, which “softens” the contrast between new growth and your dyed shade while covering grays; medium to dark blonde, which “retouches” grays; medium brown, which manages to camouflage grays while adding vibrancy to the root area; dark brown to black, which hides grays no matter how plentiful or contrasting; and copper red, which miraculously disappears grays in a variety of strawberry-to-ruby spectrum tones. As an added benefit, the powders absorb oils in the scalp to give you that freshly-shampoo’ed feel, too.

The company sells between-visits conditioners which help keep salon color fresh, too, so you can stop obsessively stalking your colorist to this end, too. (Just me?) I feel like mine is going to miss me now that I won’t need to see her every three weeks, but my bank account certainly won’t object to me spending a fraction of the price to keep this unhealthy preoccupation with perfection going strong. See you in a few months, Juli!

Newly colored? Here’s the one thing your colorist will, like, *literally die* if you do. And if you still haven’t gotten the hue quite right, try this hack for finding the perfect tint.