The Life Color Plus Naturals: .0, .00, .03 and .07, and When Each One Wins

Twenty-nine of the 160 Life Color Plus variants are naturals, and they are the shades you will reorder most. They are also the ones most often picked wrongly, because four different codes sit at the same depth and they are not interchangeable. Here is what separates .0, .00, .03 and .07.

What "natural" actually means

A natural shade is one whose reflect is zero, or close to it. It is not trying to put a tone on the hair — it is putting depth on the hair, with as little colour direction as the chemistry allows.

That is why they matter more than any other family in the range. Naturals do the two jobs that decide whether a colour service holds up:

• They supply base pigment. White hair has none, and a reflect tone applied to an empty canvas reads thin and translucent. This is the whole reason the grey-coverage protocol is built on them.
• They anchor a formula. Mixed with a reflect shade, the natural is what stops the result drifting somewhere you did not intend.

The four codes

Shade availability as listed on this site at the time of writing. All 160 variants are £3.49.

The doubled zero is the one people miss

If a client's grey keeps going translucent at the temples a fortnight after their appointment, and you are already following the protocol, moving from .0 to .00 at the same depth is the first adjustment to try — before you change developer, before you extend the timing. The shade chart guide covers the doubling convention across the rest of the range.

Warm or cool: .03 against .07

These two are the same depth and the opposite decision, and picking between them is a conversation, not a technical judgement.

• .03 leans gold. It stops a natural result reading dull, which matters on darker depths where a pure natural can look heavy and matte. For most clients, most of the time, this is the more flattering choice.
• .07 is the cooler, mat option. It exists for the client who describes their ideal colour with the word "ashy", who has told you before that their colour "goes orange", and who will notice warmth you would not.

Ask rather than assume. "Do you like a bit of warmth in it, or do you want it kept cool?" takes four seconds and settles it, and it is the kind of question covered in reading the hair rather than the photo.

Where the naturals do their real work

Heavy white coverage

On 50–100% white, the manufacturer's protocol is half the desired shade plus half a natural at the same depth, mixed 1:1 rather than the standard 1:1.5. So the natural is not an optional extra in that formula — it is half of it. Full protocol in the grey coverage guide.

This is also why your natural stock runs down faster than anything else, and why running out of 6.0 on a Saturday is a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience. More on that in which shades to stock first.

Toning down a reflect that is too much

A client wants a copper but not that copper. Rather than dropping to a weaker copper and losing the depth you wanted, mixing a proportion of the natural at the same depth pulls the intensity back while holding the level. It is the most useful thing naturals do outside grey work, and it is a cleaner solution than changing shade entirely.

Going darker

Depositing depth onto hair that has been lightened is a job for naturals, and it is one where the base pigment they carry stops the result going translucent or khaki. That deserves its own article — see going darker with Life Color Plus.

The gaps in the natural series, and what they tell you

The naturals are not evenly distributed, and the pattern is informative:

• Depth 2 does not exist in this range, and there is a 1.0 and a 3.0 either side of the gap. If you need a very dark result, you are working with 1.0 or 3.0.
• .03 stops at depth 8 and .07 stops at depth 9. At the lightest depths the warm-versus-cool decision moves out of the naturals and into the ash and violet families instead — covered in the ash series.
• Depth 10 has .0, .00 and .02 — at the top of the scale the range assumes you are managing yellow, not choosing warmth.

If you stock nothing else

Depths 5, 6, 7 and 8 in the .0 series will cover more of a typical UK column than any other four tubes in the range. Add the .00 at your two busiest depths for resistant heads, and you have a working grey-coverage kit for under £25.

Because every variant is the same £3.49, stocking the right natural rather than the nearest one costs nothing — which is not true of most professional colour lines, and it is worth taking advantage of.

The shade range in depth — part 1 of 5.
Next: The ash series: cool results that don't go flat →

Shade availability and prices as published on lifecolorplus.co.uk at the time of writing. Professional product for salon use only — follow the instructions supplied and test before every service.