$179 $149 at Zuvi

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Rating:4/10

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WIRED

Aesthetically pleasing design. Hair dye smells good. Affordable.

TIRED

Overpromises, under delivers. Proprietary app and products mean the machine isn't future-proof. The AI-powered app and website are bad.

I’ve been dyeing my hair vivid colors since the seventh grade, when I turned my hair magenta for a Halloween costume, and it accidentally stayed that way. I’ve had nearly every shade under the sun, though my favorite has always been pink. I’ve had my hair dyed professionally, and I’ve done it at home. I've bleached it to a level 10 white blond and plastered fashion colors like purple over my natural brown (terrible idea, by the way). And I've flirted with beauty printers that create custom shades of foundation before and loved them. It makes perfect sense that I’d check out the Zuvi ColorBox, an at-home device that promises to do for hair what beauty printers do for makeup, dispensing colors to dye your hair any hue. Sadly, I can’t recommend it.

An Honorable Mission

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

The Zuvi ColorBox has a kinder core aesthetic and a compact footprint. The box comes with the machine, two “base” containers, three primary color cartridges, plus a few other accessories that I ultimately deemed useless. The included bowl was cracked, the whisk is flimsy, the combination tint brush and comb are both too small to be helpful, and you only get one pair of gloves, which is borderline insulting. It also didn't include a wall adapter for the required USB-C cable, and I will never stop talking about how much it bothers me that companies have stopped including all necessary components.

The Zuvi ColorBox app was still in beta when I was using it, so there's a chance my assessment of it will no longer be relevant at some point. But I found it confusing and cumbersome. In theory, it's cool (a common theme with this product): You can choose from over 1,000 preconfigured hair dye shades, and see how they'd look over your base color (ranging from “light blond” to “light brown.") You can also upload an image and pick the color from it, which involved the app repeatedly asking for access to all of my phone photos, and then me realizing I had to precisely tap the chosen pixel for the color picker—there was no sliding the tool around like you can on Instagram Stories, for example.

ScreenshotZuvi app via Louryn Strampe

I decided to try to replicate the neon pink that took me 10 years to perfect. First, I chose a pixel from a photo where my hair looked particularly vibrant. The app recommended a color, and then I told the machine to dispense a sample-sized amount. It squirted out a bit of the base white, followed by a bit of the “red,” which actually looks more magenta to me. I mixed it up. It wasn't right—too pastel, too washed out. I applied it to a Level 10 blond extension to see how it'd hold up. It was even more diluted once on the hair, and nowhere near the eye-watering blue-based neon pink I'd requested.

So I went directly to the source. I screenshot a photo of the swatches from the hair dye brand I use and told the ColorBox app to replicate it. This time, the sample size squirted out some base, some red, and then tried and failed for 10 minutes to produce any yellow from the cartridge. “Dispensing … 91 percent," the app confidently told me. Great! Another lying robot set out to ask for all my photos and do a mediocre job at something I could've just done myself. But I tried to remain positive. I waited patiently. I mixed up the resulting sample size, with no yellow, because after three attempts and even some manual shaking, it still wouldn't come out. This pink sample was closer, but ultimately just looked like a slightly more pigmented version of the first color I tried. Neither was correct. Neither was vivid. Neither is going to last beyond a wash or two.

You can choose from a color wheel or tweak the recommended shades, but I was never able to get close to the pink I was seeking. No matter where I went on the color wheel, I could never get a truly intense color. They were always just different variations of the same washed-out pastels. The app also tries to offer helpful estimates on what a color will look like on different base hair shades. But as any professional (or professional DIY-er) knows, vivid colors simply do not look vivid unless you apply them to pre-lightened or very light hair.

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

Early review videos of the ColorBox that I watched after testing confirm what preteen girls have been discovering since Manic Panic first hit the scene: No matter how much you want it to, blue hair dye is never going to look right over your brown hair.

The app does say you should pre-lighten hair, but I fear that beginners looking f

Zuvi ColorBox Review: A Hair Dye Printer That Struggles | WIRED