16 Brands Like Arctic Fox for Vibrant Hair Colors
The bottle is empty, the roots are showing, and the shade you wanted has been out of stock for three weeks. Arctic Fox is a semi-permanent vivid hair colour brand whose formulas skip peroxide, ammonia and PPD, run vegan, and send 15% of net profits to animal welfare and community causes, with standard shades at £13 a bottle on its UK store. That combination is hard to walk away from. It is not the only place to get it.
Below are 16 brands like Arctic Fox that sell the same thing: semi-permanent vivid colour you apply at home or ask a stylist for. Some undercut Arctic Fox on price, some hold longer, and three of them you can only get through a salon. Prices below come from each brand's own store, in the currency that store sells in.
Quick comparison:
- Closest to Arctic Fox: Manic Panic, Lunar Tides, Good Dye Young, Iroiro
- Cheapest: Punky Colour, Crazy Color, Adore, Splat
- Salon only: Joico Color Intensity, Pravana Chromasilk Vivids, Pulp Riot
- Pastels and soft shades: Lime Crime Unicorn Hair, Schwarzkopf Live Color
- Bleach included in the box: Splat
- Supermarket aisle: L'Oreal Colorista
- UK picks: Bleach London, Crazy Color
- Topping up between dye jobs: oVertone
| Brand | Price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Manic Panic | $13.99 a jar | The original punk shades |
| Lime Crime Unicorn Hair | $12 to $18 | Pastels that fade cleanly |
| Joico Color Intensity | Salon, mid-range | Colour that outlasts 20 washes |
| Pravana Chromasilk Vivids | Salon, mid-range | Stylists mixing custom shades |
| Adore | Budget | 64 shades on a small budget |
| Punky Colour | $8.99 for 3.5 fl oz | The cheapest full jar here |
| Splat | Kit $12.99 | Colouring dark hair without bleach |
| Schwarzkopf Live Color | Budget | Mixing your own pastel strength |
| Bleach London | £8.95 for 150ml | UK shoppers who want salon backup |
| Iroiro | From $12.99 | Coconut oil formulas |
| Lunar Tides | $13.49 | Muted, smoky and grey shades |
| oVertone | $14.75 conditioner, $32 mask | Keeping colour alive between dyes |
| L'Oreal Colorista | $12.99 | Buying colour with your groceries |
| Good Dye Young | $19 | Backing a musician-run brand |
| Crazy Color | From £6.45 | PPD-free colour made in the UK |
| Pulp Riot | Salon, premium | Trusting a colourist with the whole head |
Manic Panic
Manic Panic is the vegan, cruelty-free semi-permanent dye brand that got to this category before anyone else, and its Classic High Voltage range costs $13.99 a jar. Atomic Turquoise, Cotton Candy Pink, Electric Amethyst and Fuschia Shock are the shades people recognise on sight. The classic formula holds about four to six weeks, so the brand also sells an Amplified line with heavier pigment for anyone tired of touching up. Worth knowing before you order: the classics fade faster on porous hair, so start with Amplified if your ends are bleached out. Our list of brands like Manic Panic goes deeper on the punk-dye end of this market.
Best for: The shades that started the whole category.
Lime Crime Unicorn Hair
Lime Crime sells its semi-permanent colour as Unicorn Hair, split into two formulas, and picking the right one matters more than picking the shade. Full Coverage ($18) drops solid pigment onto lightened hair, while Tints ($18) sit sheerer for pastel work. Both come in 3oz bottles at $12 if you want to test a colour before committing to the full size. Lime Crime is 100% vegan and cruelty-free, same as Arctic Fox, and the palette leans soft and dusty rather than neon. See also our roundup of brands like Lime Crime.
Best for: Pastels that wash out without going swampy.
Shop Lime Crime Unicorn Hair Now
Joico Color Intensity
Joico Color Intensity is a salon-only semi-permanent vivid colour line that lasts up to 20 or more shampoos, which roughly doubles what most home dyes on this list manage. It needs no developer and goes on straight from the tube, and every shade intermixes, so a colourist can build a custom tone rather than working from the chart. Kukui nut oil in the formula is what keeps hair conditioned through the process. Joico also sells a Color Intensity Eraser that lifts direct dye in 30 minutes or less, which is the piece Arctic Fox has no equivalent for. It sells through salon distributors, so expect mid-range pricing set by your stylist.
Best for: Colour that survives a month of washing.
Shop Joico Color Intensity Now
Pravana Chromasilk Vivids
Pravana Chromasilk Vivids is a semi-permanent, non-oxidative colour built for colourists, and Pravana calls it the industry's largest semi-permanent creative colour collection. No developer, no mixing ratios to get wrong. Every shade blends into every other, and the VIVIDS Clear-Dilute lets a stylist pastelise any colour instead of buying a separate pastel range. Shade names like Sangria and Periwinkle give you the register. Pravana sells through distributors like CosmoProf and SalonCentric rather than direct, so there is no list price on the site and your stylist sets the cost of the service.
Best for: A colourist who wants to mix a shade that does not exist yet.
Shop Pravana Chromasilk Vivids Now
Adore Creative Image Hair Color
Adore is a budget semi-permanent hair colour running 64 shades with no ammonia, peroxide or alcohol in the formula, which is a shorter ingredient list than most competitors can claim. The pigment is plant-based and the whole range is vegan and cruelty-free. Shades like Luxe Blue, Sapphire Blue, Periwinkle and Aquamarine give you a dozen options inside a single colour family. Adore sits at the budget end and prices are set by whichever beauty supply you buy it from, so this is the brand to reach for when you want to try four colours for the cost of two Arctic Fox jars.
Best for: Experimenting across a colour family without overspending.
Shop Adore Creative Image Hair Color Now
Punky Colour
Punky Colour is a budget semi-permanent dye brand, and at $8.99 for 3.5 fl oz it sells the cheapest full-size jar on this list, across 28 semi-permanent conditioning shades including Flamingo Pink, Atlantic Blue, Alpine Green and Cotton Candy. That is around a third off what most of this list charges per bottle. The newer Sugar Cloud foam comes in 6 oz at $14.99 with plant-based vegetable protein and ethically sourced sugar cane in the mix, and Punky also sells a 3-in-1 colour depositing shampoo at $14.99 for stretching a colour out. Free US shipping kicks in above $49, so this is a brand to stock up from in one order.
Best for: Stocking a shelf of colours on one order.
Splat Hair Color
Splat is an at-home semi-permanent colour brand that sells complete kits with bleach included at $12.99, which is the difference between it and Arctic Fox: you are buying the lightening step in the same box. Blue Envy, Pink Fetish, Purple Desire and Lusty Lavender all come that way. The No-Bleach Midnight line, also $12.99, is the more interesting one, built to show up on dark hair without lightening it first, in shades like Midnight Tanzanite and Midnight Jade. Splat says its colour lasts up to 30 washes, which is a long time to commit. Take that seriously before you pick a shade.
Best for: Colouring dark hair in one box, no bleach step.
Schwarzkopf Live Color
Schwarzkopf LIVE sells its vivids as Ultra Brights, an ammonia-free vegan colour cream that holds up to 15 washes. The clever part is the pack: a conditioner sachet comes with every tube, and you either use it after rinsing or mix it into the cream first to get a pastel result from the same product. One box, two colour strengths. The tube is 100% recycled aluminium. LIVE sits at the budget end of the market, and it is the easiest way to test a pastel without buying a dedicated pastel range.
Best for: Dialling your own colour strength from one tube.
Shop Schwarzkopf Live Color Now
Bleach London
Bleach London runs its Super Cool Colour range at £8.95 for 150ml, in shades named Washed Up Mermaid, Violet Skies, Green Juice and Awkward Peach. The whole line is vegan and PETA-approved. What separates Bleach from a pure dye brand is the salon side: three London locations plus a West Hollywood shop, so the bleach-and-tone step can be handed to someone else and the colour maintained at home. UK shipping is free above £30. If you have ever bleached your own hair badly, this is the brand that fixes that order of operations.
Best for: UK shoppers who want the bleaching done professionally.
Iroiro
Iroiro is a semi-permanent colour brand that builds every shade on pure coconut oil, and the whole range is 100% vegan and cruelty-free. Colour starts at $12.99, which puts it level with Arctic Fox rather than under it, and orders ship from Katy, Texas. Iroiro is unusual for covering the full job in one place: a bleach kit at $18.99 to lighten first, then colour depositing shampoo at $23.99 to hold the shade once it is on. If you read ingredient lists before you buy, this is the one on the list that rewards it.
Best for: Conditioning oils in the dye itself.
Lunar Tides
Lunar Tides is a vegan, cruelty-free semi-permanent dye brand that sorts its shades into eight collections, and the useful ones are the collections few other brands bother with. Velvet covers deep jewel tones, Smokey does muted pastels with grey underneath, Greyscale runs silver through white, and Frost adds a silver cast to pastels. Standard shades cost $13.49 and the multidimensional Magic range costs $14.49. Arctic Fox is stronger on candy brights. Lunar Tides is where you go for the darker, dustier end of the same idea, with names like Dragon Fruit and Cerulean Sea.
Best for: Smoky and muted shades instead of neon.
oVertone
oVertone is the maintenance product rather than the dye. Its cruelty-free colour-depositing daily conditioner costs $14.75 for 4.5oz and its treatment masks cost $32, in shades from Cosmic Cobalt and Emerald Envy through to Espresso Brown and Chocolate Brown. You use it in the shower and it tops up pigment that has washed down the drain since the last application. Anyone who has watched a fresh dye job go dull in nine days knows the problem this solves. Pair it with any brand on this list rather than choosing between them.
Best for: Stretching a colour out for another few weeks.
L'Oreal Colorista
L'Oreal Colorista Semi-Permanent costs $12.99 in a 100% vegan formula, with Pink, Hot Pink, Bright Red, Purple and Teal alongside metallic shades. It is the one on this list you can pick up on a normal supermarket run. Read the reviews before you buy, though, because L'Oreal publishes them on its own product page and the score sits at 2.7 out of 5 across 1,908 reviews. The recurring complaint is colour that either vanishes in three washes or refuses to leave bleached hair. Test a strand first.
Best for: Buying vivid colour without ordering online.
Good Dye Young
Good Dye Young was founded by Hayley Williams of Paramore with her longtime colourist Brian O'Connor, and the semi-permanent range costs $19 a shade. The OG eight cover the spectrum: Ex-Girl pink, PPL Eater purple, Blue Ruin, Rock Lobster red, Riot orange, Kowabunga green, Narwhal teal and Steal My Sunshine yellow. Vegan and cruelty-free throughout. At $19 it is the most expensive at-home option here, and what you are paying for is a brand built by two people who have been colouring hair on tour for years.
Best for: Backing a brand run by the people who use it.
Crazy Color
Crazy Color starts at £6.45 and is made in the UK, vegan, PETA approved, and free of both PPD and ammonia. That last point matters if you have reacted to a box dye before, since PPD sits behind most hair colour allergies. The semi-permanent range is sorted by shade family, including UV-reactive and pastel groups, and recent additions cover Dusky Pink, Pretty Peach, True Copper and Baby Blue. Power Pigment drops cost £16.45 for mixing your own strength into conditioner.
Best for: The cheapest PPD-free colour on this list.
Pulp Riot
Pulp Riot works the premium end of salon vivids, with collections split into OG, Neon, Fantasy, NeoPop, Cosmic and Sin City, plus specialist ranges like Raven and Precious Metals. The brand's line is "You are the artist. Pulp Riot is the paint", and the whole product is built around a colourist executing a plan rather than a shopper picking a jar. There is no retail price on the site and no direct sales. You find a stylist through the Artist Locator and the cost comes with the appointment.
Best for: Handing a full colour transformation to a professional.
How to Choose the Right Brand for You
Work backwards from two questions: how dark is your hair now, and how long do you want the colour to stay. Dark hair with no bleach in the plan points at Splat's No-Bleach Midnight kits. Pre-lightened hair opens up the whole list, and the longest-lasting options are the salon ones, Joico and Pravana, which hold past 20 washes.
On price, Punky Colour at $8.99 and Crazy Color from £6.45 undercut everything else, and Crazy Color is the pick if PPD has given you trouble before. For anything muted, smoky or grey-toned, Lunar Tides has a range no one else matches. And if the colour you already have is the problem, oVertone costs less than a fresh dye job.
One habit worth building: buy the maintenance product at the same time as the dye. Colour fades from the first wash, and topping it up costs less than starting again. Our wider guide to hair dye brands like Arctic Fox covers the shade-matching side in more detail.
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Written by
Spencer Lanoue
