Just for Men and 2 root touch-ups

Our tests also included a product designed to partly cover gray in men and two designed to cover visible roots between colorings.

Just for Men Touch of Gray ($8)

This comb-in product blends the color into a man's existing gray hair to reduce the gray without covering it completely. It's a progressive dye, meaning you can reapply it over a period of days until the color darkens (and the gray diminishes) to your liking.

We recruited 11 male staffers to take the product home and use it one, two, or three times—their choice—and tell us what they thought. Many said Just for Men Touch of Gray did a good job of covering gray hair and looked quite natural. Seven said they'd buy it again, though three of them said so only after a second application.

We also applied Touch of Gray to 18 sample gray tresses in our lab and measured the resulting color. The colorimeter readings confirmed that the hair indeed got progressively darker after each application (we did three).

Bottom line

For men who want subtle gray coverage or to gradually build up color, this product is worth a try. Note that the color may take a while to darken, so it's a good idea to wait a few days in between applications to avoid ending up with hair darker than you wanted it to be.

Clairol Nice'n Easy Root Touch-Up ($7)
Revlon ColorSilk Root Perfect ($4)

We dyed 30 gray tresses with two different permanent brown dyes (one from Clairol and one from Revlon), covering only the lower portion of each tress. Then we put the corresponding root coverage products (Clairol Nice'n Easy Root Touch-Up for Clairol, Revlon ColorSilk Root Perfect for Revlon) on the tresses' top portions, leaving them on for the 15 minutes recommended by the directions for covering stubborn gray.

In our test, the Revlon product more closely matched its corresponding permanent dye than the Clairol root product did. The Revlon model was also less messy, with a single applicator bottle in which you mix the activating lotion and color crème rather than a separate mixing tray and brush, as the Clairol product had. Interestingly, both root products state on the box that you can use them with various permanent dyes from different brands, and provide the shades of each brand to which they correspond. In fact, the Revlon root product we tested can be used with the same Clairol dye we used, and vice versa.

Bottom line

Though both colored the roots, the Revlon product had a better color match to its permanent dye than the Clairol did. And Revlon costs less and didn't make as much of a mess in our test.