First of all, I've been doing hair for YEARS and I was one of those people who talked down about box dye...However, I was in a bind the other day and was completely out of lightener and was in desperate need of it. All professional stores were closed so I bit the bullet and bought this at my local grocery store...AND OH MY GOODNESS!!! This stuff is better than what I use at the salon I ran!!! I can't get over how well and EVEN this lifted my super dark hair extensions!!! This little gem lifted the hair to a beautiful blonde on the first try! That's unheard of!!! I hope they keep this product forever, because I am in love and refuse to use anything else now!

General tips: 1. This product is a very thick cream that makes it super difficult to distribute over your hair so you can easily miss patches and get non-uniform results. My suggestion is not to use its applicator instead pour it in a plastic bowl and use a dye brush or your hand to distribute it evenly. 2. At least buy two boxes. One box is not enough unless you have supper short or very thin hair (I wish L'Oréal was more generous!). I have shoulder-length hair and even two bottles were not enough for me, and I missed small patches in the back. It is always good to have extra to completely cover and saturate everything to avoid patchy results. What you can expect from this product: My natural hair color is dark brown level 2 or 3, it is not thick at all. I used to dye my hair with Champagne Blonde (8.5A), L'Oréal Excellence Crème, and I like it on my natural hair. It doesn’t come out as in the picture on the box at all (as expected) but it gives me light brown/dark brown color with the minimum orange tone possible without bleaching. Of course, it becomes brassy after several weeks, as you can see in the picture under artificial lights (in reality it is not as bad as in the picture!). The Feria Hyper Platinum can lift my dyed hair as well as my natural hair at the root up to yellow-gold bleached color (about level 8) as you can see in the picture. I put it about 60+ min away from my root and 30+ min at my root per its instruction. The purple conditioner does not do much at all! Only my baby hair around my face became platinum blond! In a nutshell, it works like bleach, but does not burn the scalp, and does not give you enough lift and ashy tone to get to platinum blonde from dark hair. You need additional toner treatment to get a good result.