When my local Aveda salon closed in October I was forced to find a new hairdressers to keep my not-a-natural-redhead secret. I had read a piece by Imelda Burke (founder of natural store Content Beauty) in the Telegraph of the best natural hair dyes and the main ingredients to avoid. Natural Colour Works, based close to me in Soho, was cited and seemed like a good place to start.

The disastrous selfie taking continues, but at least the hair looks good

Owner Bradley clearly has a wealth of experience when it comes to colouring. Because my hair is dark he had to use their soya based permanent colour to lift it at the roots and this does contain low levels of peroxide. Apparently if my hair were even a shade lighter I could get away with the water based colour everywhere. Darn it. But the rest of my hair was coloured with their 95% water based dye.

The cut was brilliant and Bradley styled my hair really nicely; he knows his curls and seemed genuinely concerned with unlocking my hair’s potential, somewhat ravaged by years of abuse. He also gave me lots of advice to avoid fade on my colour (cool showers and no heat on the hair).

I often experience discomfort when I’m having my hair coloured and I didn’t with these dyes. They also only kept them on for 30 minutes so the whole process was really speedy; in the past I’ve felt like colouring my hair takes hours.

Bradley did point out that his hair dyes are not 100% natural. You can’t lighten and dye hair without a bit of help, but I’m told they’ve taken out a lot of the more toxic ingredients and all the products are ammonia free. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that to continue as a redhead I can’t be a total green beauty purist and that once every six weeks or so I have to sit with some ingredients on my scalp that I would probably struggle to pronounce. But that’s OK…it seems like Natural Colour Works has tried to eliminate some of the worst ones.

Total cost for my cut and colour was £128, very reasonable for a London salon. Details for booking:

Natural Colour Works website (formerly Jigami Hairdressing)