Grey systems without the coin flip

You pick a shade off a colour ring. It looks close. Weeks later the box arrives, you hold it up next to your hair by a window, and it's off — too dark, too light, or flat in a way grey never is on a real head.

Now you're out the money, out the weeks, and starting over.

That's most of what people tell us when they first get in touch. It's also why the grey side of our catalogue looks the way it does.

Grey isn't a shade, it's a ratio

There's no single colour to match. Your hair is whatever it was before it started greying, plus grey mixed through at some percentage, and even the grey strands aren't all the same — some are white, some silver, some halfway between.

A unit finished in one flat grey tone can't reproduce that. Photos hide it. Daylight doesn't. Across a dinner table, a solid block of silver sitting above your own roots just reads as wrong.

So "which grey is closest?" is the wrong question to be asking. What you actually need is a percentage, distributed the way your hair distributes it.

Why most stock units use synthetic grey

Short answer: human grey hair yellows.

It takes months and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Leave grey units on a shelf for a season and the silver drifts brassy — the unit leaves the factory correct and arrives wrong.

Synthetic grey doesn't move. The tone it's packed in is the tone you open, and it sits fine alongside the human hair in the rest of the unit. If something's going to wait in inventory, synthetic is the practical choice.

It's also the reason we can keep inventory at all: roughly 48,000 grey-blend units in the warehouse, from 5% grey up to 90%. Somebody noticing their first temple strands and somebody who's 85% silver both get a unit that isn't a compromise.

If you want real hair

We make custom orders in 100% human grey, and in yak grey, which has a grey tone of its own and behaves like human hair once it's on your head.

Custom means you pick the grey percentage, the base, the density, the hairline. Ship time is about 40 days. Most quotes in this industry run two to three months; ours is shorter because we own the factory and there's no third party's queue to sit in.

Working out your percentage

Rough guide, and it is genuinely rough — plenty of people land between two of these:

• 5-10% — first silver coming in, mostly at the temples

• 20-30% — clear salt and pepper, original colour still dominant

• 40-50% — even mix

• 60-70% — grey is the dominant tone now, base colour still visible

• 80-90% — nearly all grey, a trace of your original colour left

Can't tell? Send a photo taken outdoors, no flash. Colour matching by email is free.

Things that make matching easier

Judge from your roots, not your ends. Ends are years of sun and wear; roots are closer to what you're actually trying to match.

Check by a window, not over the bathroom sink. Warm bulbs push everything yellow.

Ask someone else. You can't get a straight look at the back of your own head.

Start with stock if you're unsure. It ships in days, and even a slightly-off match tells you which direction to move next time. Go custom once you know your number.

What's here

48,000 grey-blend units in stock, blends from 5% to 90%. 124 colours held permanently. Synthetic grey on stock units, so nothing shifts in storage. Custom human grey and yak grey in about 40 days. Free matching by email, fast shipping on anything in stock.

If your hair sits between two blends, tell us and we'll say so rather than nudging you toward one. Better than gambling twice.