Home / Hairstyles / Espresso
Espresso
The darkest brown before black, a deep coffee-bean depth with a faint warm base rather than a blue-black cast.
Try Espresso on your own photo. Free to download, iPhone, iOS 15.1 or later.
Both renders are HairGlam output. In the app the shade lands on your photo instead.
Held next to a true black it is clearly a brown, but indoors that difference disappears and it simply reads as very dark. Sunlight is what reveals it, showing a muted red-brown glow at the ends where light passes through the hair. Because the pigment is dark and dense it fades slowly, drifting toward a flat, slightly dusty brown over a couple of months rather than turning brassy. The depth makes the whites of the eyes look brighter by contrast.
- Undertonewarm, neutral. The warmth in it is low and coffee-like rather than golden, so it sits against olive and cool-fair skin alike without pulling orange.
- Starting pointIt deposits over almost any base from mid-brown down and needs no lifting on hair that is already dark, though previously bleached hair should be filled first so it does not grab green.
- UpkeepA gloss around every seventh week stops the depth from going dull, and regrowth is barely visible unless your natural base is several levels lighter.
Try it before the bleach
Color is the expensive mistake to get wrong. Put Espresso against your own skin tone first.
Related shades
Chocolate Brown
Chestnut
Ash BrownSee it on your own face first
Every style in this catalog renders onto a photo of you, so you are judging your own face shape and coloring rather than a model's.
Free to download. iPhone, iOS 15.1 or later.