We’ve changed our colour house.
From September, colour services at MAJOR hair salons is being carried out using Davines. It’s the first time we’ve changed our professional colour house in a VERY long time, and it isn’t a decision we came to quickly.
We’ve been colouring hair in Northampton since 1992. In that time we’ve watched a lot of products come and go, and we’ve turned down many more brand switches than we’ve made. This one we said yes to, and this is the honest explanation of why.
Who Davines actually are
Davines is a family business from Parma in Italy, founded by the Bollati family in 1983. It started life as a research laboratory making high-end hair products for other companies, and only later began putting its own name on the bottle, which tells you something about where the priorities sit. The company is still headquartered in Parma, at a site they call the Davines Village, and it’s still family-led.
They’re also a certified B Corporation, and have been since 2016, one of the first cosmetics companies anywhere in the world to go through it. B Corp certification isn’t a logo you buy. It’s an independent assessment of how a company treats its people, its suppliers, its customers and the environment, it has to be re-earned every few years, and the standards get harder each time. Davines recertified again in 2026 under B Lab’s newer, tougher criteria.
We’re a family business too. Two salons, one family, thirty-odd years in the same town. It matters to us that the people making what we put on your hair think about it the same way we do.
What Davines colour does differently
The technical case is what actually decided it. Three things stood out.
Colour that holds on. The permanent colour system is built around a technology Davines calls Vibrachrom. In plain terms: a quinoa protein extract helps the hair fibre take up and hold onto pigment, and a phospholipid carrier, borrowed from textile science, helps pigment travel evenly from root to end rather than grabbing in patches. Davines’ own wash testing showed noticeably less colour washing out over repeated shampoos compared with the same formulas without it. What that means in the chair is a shade that looks like it did on day one for longer, and roots-to-ends tone that doesn’t drift.
Condition, not just colour. The formulas carry a vegetal conditioning agent rich in Omega 9, so the hair is being conditioned during the colouring process rather than just afterwards. For anyone who colours regularly, and most of our colour clients are in every six to eight weeks, that compounding effect over a year is significant. Shine that comes from healthy hair, not from a product sitting on top of it.
A more comfortable service. No PPD, no parabens, and a fragrance designed to take the edge off the smell of ammonia. If you’ve ever sat through a colour with your eyes watering, you’ll notice the difference.
The packaging is FSC-certified and recyclable, and the CO2 from producing it is offset through reforestation. That’s not why we changed. But it’s a reason we didn’t hesitate.
What this means for your colour
Nothing you need to do.
Your formula travels with you. Your colourist has your full colour history, and they’ve been trained on matching your existing shade into the new system before you sit down. If you’re a regular, they’ll have already worked out your Davines formula.
Your shade is your shade. This isn’t a change of look. You’ll leave with the colour you came in for, we’d expect you to notice the shine and the way it wears over the following weeks, rather than anything on the day.
Ask your stylist anything. Everyone on the floor has been through the training and is genuinely enthusiastic about it. If you’ve got a question about your specific colour, the chair is the place to ask it.
It’s ready when you’re next in.
One local note: Northampton water
This is worth saying because it’s specific to us and it isn’t in any brochure.
Northamptonshire has some of the hardest water in England, the county consistently ranks near the top of national hardness tables, and Anglian Water classes its whole supply area as hard to very hard. Every time you wash your hair at home in Northampton, calcium and magnesium are going onto it.
For coloured hair, hard water is a slow problem. Mineral deposit builds on the hair shaft, dulls shine, and can pull tone, blondes going brassy or grey-toned faster than they should, brunettes losing depth, and colour that fades quicker than it ought to.
A colour system with better pigment retention and stronger conditioning built into it is doing more work in Northampton than it would in, say, Manchester. That’s a real part of why this brand, for this town, made sense to us.
We’ve written in more detail about hard water and hair in Northampton, including what actually helps at home.
Coming to see us
We’re a Davines salon in Northampton across both our sites in Abington and Weston Favell. If you’re already booked in, there’s nothing to change. If you’ve been thinking about a colour change, or you’ve been away from us a while, this is a good moment.