A sampling of my root touch-up journey from Oribe, Style Edit, L'oreal, Color Wow, Rita Hazen, Clairol and others.
Sprouting gray hair for the first time can feel like being visited by a ghost — unexpected, unwelcome and a lingering reminder of both the future (you're closer than ever to death!) and the past (the youth you no longer have!). While I admire women who embrace their grays, at 51, I'm not quite there yet. But salon appointments can be costly and inconvenient, and even maintaining your hair color at home with at-home dye jobs requires that you stretch your color to keep your secret silver crown hidden from the world. That’s where the best gray-root touch-up products — namely, sprays, sticks and powders — come in to save the day.
"The most effective way to cover gray roots at home is to use a root touch-up kit," says New Jersey hairstylist and colorist Jennifer Korab. "The ones that work best are root concealer sprays or powders for a quick, but temporary, fix. Choose a shade that matches your hair color and apply in sections for even coverage."
I've used several root touch-up products for years, and when I began reporting this story, I assumed most would perform about the same. But after two weeks of testing more than a dozen sprays, powders and sticks, I found that gray root touch-up options on the market are far from equal — in fact, many barely worked at all.
At their best, root touch-up treatments should be effective, affordable, easy to use and highly pigmented — without transferring to your clothes or pillowcases or leaving behind a telltale mess. The list below highlights the best root touch-ups I've tested — most are sprays, which I found far superior to sticks and powders. Many have earned a spot in my regular hair care rotation as my go-tos whenever I'm in a ghostly gray hair pinch.
Update, June 24, 2025: We checked all product prices and availability. Our top pick for the best root touch-up product remains unchanged.
L'Oreal's Magic Root Cover Up is the gold standard of temporary silver hair concealers and for good reason: It's available in nine shades, as opposed to the three that many brands offer and, once applied, it quickly and effectively conceals gray roots until your next shampoo. It's a super popular product, with tens of thousands of 5-star Amazon reviews and even has celebs like Eva Longoria singing its quick-fix gray-covering praises.
"Great product!" one five-star reviewer wrote. "Always a saver. When I can’t get to the salon to get my hair done this saved me so much, even when I didn’t go for like a month or two longer than I should’ve gone. You can always depend on this. And it really matches well with my hair. No one could really tell."
"I got this to spray on the dreadful grays that show up in the part on the top of my head," another Amazon reviewer explained. "I hate paying the high prices at the salons, so I use this to hide the grays and extend the time between visits."
Some fans consider it a beauty life saver, calling it "a staple I can't live without."
I mostly agree with all of these assessments, though I will say, if we're quibbling, Magic Root Cover Up has a few downsides. It's a bit sticky, even after it dries and can feel a bit heavy on your scalp. Despite all the shade options, the color match is imprecise. It worked fine for my husband's naturally dark brown/black hair (I tested on his hair and mine for this story — poor guy). But I couldn't get the right Magic Root Cover Up hue for my own blonde mane.
Still, for a quick-fix problem solver and a product that actually works and works well — especially for $10 — the pros here far outweigh the cons.
There are few circumstances in which I'd recommend a root touch-up stick:
1. If you have, say, a long gray streak you wish to hide and the patience to color it in with essentially a crayon.
2. If you've sprouted a sprinkling of white just at the temples and wish to quickly draw over it.
3. If you are a middle-aged man with light facial hair and you desire your soul patch not to resemble Santa's soul patch.
4. If your otherwise youthful-looking hair grows silver in just one random spot, and for some reason, you see this as unattractive and not actually as adorable as it is.
Root touch-up sticks mostly all feel the same — waxy, like that oil pastel you tried to draw with once in art class, thinking it was a crayon. But they can be effective for covering up unwanted silver in small areas that require precision, and they're especially good for both facial hair and those early grays that pop up at your temples.
Of the sticks I tested, Everpro's was the strongest in pigment while transferring the least. It also didn't flake like some others I tried, nor leave my hair tacky or sticky. It would be great for gray emergencies and also for travel. If you have grays that you don't love, I'd say it's worth keeping one of these sticks in your purse for a quick cover fix.
While I believe root cover-up sprays are superior in most circumstances, this powder from Boldify is more effective and less messy than others I tried. Plus, though it did require a few "coats" to build color and cover my roots, it adhered to my scalp and hair cuticles and barely transferred, even when I really tried.
But the real reason I'm including it here is I found this product to be not only serviceable for covering grays, but even more so for filling in a sparse hairline. If you have silver roots and you're also suffering from thinning hair, this might just be your ticket. It's not as harsh as some of the spray formulations while being easy to wash out — all of which is crucial for maintaining fine, thinning hair and helping stave off additional shedding. You can apply it with the included sponge but I also had success with a clean makeup brush.
Last, for a powder, the shade range here is impressive; there are 14 shades to choose from (the best selection of this list), including three blonde. There's even a silver option, if you're interested in keeping your grays while filling in patchiness and making your coif look more robust. Last surprise bonus: The powder works a bit as a dry shampoo to absorb excess oil so you can shampoo less.
Even with all of these positives, I'll say Boldify's powder is most effective for small coverage areas like the temples and not large swaths of gray roots.
There are few things I hate more as a beauty editor than when a higher-priced item turns out to be better than a perfectly good, less-expensive one. However, as it turns out, Style Edit's Root Concealer is just a hair (no pun) more effective than my top overall pick from L'Oreal — particularly for blondes.
First, the product itself is lightweight, while still remaining heavily pigmented. It also dries instantly, with zero transfer and no stickiness — it feels more like a dry shampoo than a heavy gray concealer and even gave the crown of my hair a welcome volume lift.
But the star here is the ultra-precise color match. More specifically: "naturally-derived color-adaptive pigments" that "adhere to the hair fiber and self-adjust to perfectly match hair color," according to the brand. I have dark blonde hair and I've never had a root cover up spray match this well. In fact, before trying Style Edit's "Blonde Perfection" shade, I'd accepted that, in order to cover the silver, I'd need to temporarily live with darker roots.
With its feather light formula plus advanced color-match technology, Style Edit has created the Cadillac of root touch-up sprays. If you don't have blonde hair or if you find your color is not difficult to match, you probably don't need this much excellence, which is why it's not my top pick. But if you want to splash out on a product that's superior in almost every way, keep in mind a little spritz goes a long way: You'll use and enjoy this highly effective spray for months.
If you're going swimming, sweat a lot or plan to be in the rain and don't want to look like Rudy Giuliani that one time, this root cover-up spray from celebrity colorist Rita Hazan (her clients include Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez and Jessica Simpson), is among the best I've tried. It's specially formulated to look natural across a variety of hair shades. It's also water-resistant and really binds to the hair without the use of alcohol or ammonia.
Best of all, for me at least, is the precision nozzle which ensures the product goes and stays where you want it, without a lot of effort or finesse. Root touch-up sprays for blondes can be particularly tough to get right shade-wise but this one matched my honey-hued mane near-perfectly without looking brassy or fake.
In terms of what I didn't like: The product takes a LONG time to dry (10-15 minutes) and, before it does, will stain anything it comes in contact with and those stains are hard to remove. When I styled my hair after an initial application my fingertips remained dark blonde-colored throughout the day.
I waited until I was 12 weeks out from my last visit to the colorist and my hair had ample gray roots. Over a two week period, I tried more than a dozen sprays, sticks and powders. I rated them on: coverage, pigment quality, shade match, ease of use and value. I also tested the endurance of each product (sprays uniformly lasted until my next wash, powders often disappeared by midday, sticks were somewhere in between) and if they transferred to clothes while I was getting dressed and sheets while I slept. Finally, I reviewed the formulas themselves to see if and how they changed the texture of my hair — were they sticky or tacky? Did they weigh my roots down? Did they add a benefit like crown volume?
Application type: First things first, assess your needs: Are you mostly covering a silver streak or an entire, months-between-dyeing ashy crown? Sprays are most effective for coverage over large areas along with more precise color matching and staying power. A powder or stick works best for small sections of the hair, or areas where you need an extra zeroed in application.
Shade range: If your hair is a more straightforward color (say medium brown), you can get away with a product with a super limited shade range, but if you have blonde or even auburn hair, you'll need more variety to find a closer match.
Oribe's Airbrush Root Touch-Up Spray: I discovered this product on a number of best lists but, when I tried it myself, I found the formula to be a sheer mist that did literally nothing for me (see photo above).
Color Wow Roots Cover-Up: Similarly, while this product is popular on social media, it was ineffective at covering my crown roots, no matter how much I applied.
The "best" way to touch up your grays will depend on which type of treatment you prefer: spray, stick or powder. If you're using a spray, angle the nozzle 2-4 inches away from the target area and spritz sparingly — if the product is of high quality, a light mist will do. For better coverage, use a comb while the product is wet to spread through the entire area and keep it from getting matted in one place. Some stylists I spoke with recommended using a makeup brush for both powders and sprays and painting them on, though this seems like far too much work for me!
"If you're using root powder [or spray], you can touch up your gray roots as often as you need — it's totally temporary and washes out with your next shampoo," says Korab. "So, if your grays are showing and you’ve got somewhere to be, just dust it on and you’re good to go. Some people use these products daily, others just when they want a little boost between salon visits. As for professional or at home hair dye, every 4-6 weeks is recommended."
Depending on the type of treatment, temporary cover-ups can last days or hours. Most root touch-up sprays will take you from application until the next time you shampoo. Powders may not last a full day.
We received complimentary samples of some products and purchased others ourselves, but we reviewed all products using the same objective criteria.
