Color one's hair vs dye one's hair

Question

HiWould you say that both of these sentences are equally natural and synonymous?After her allergy aggravated, she stopped coloring her hair. After her allergy aggravated, she stopped dying her hair. Thanks,Tom

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Mr. TomWould you say that both of these sentences are equally natural and synonymous?

Yes.

Clive · Answer

Your grammar in the first part is not correct.

say eg After it (ie the colouring) aggravated her allergy, she stopped coloring her hair.

In my limited experience as a male, I think most women prefer the word 'coloring' to the word 'dyeing'.

Anonymous · Answer

The two sentences are both correct and synonymous, but there's a significant difference in register and connotation:

"Color" is a very positive term, whereas "dye" can be negative (as it's more closely associated with chemicals, fakeness, etc.). If someone wants to make dyeing your hair sound good, they'll use "color".
To "dye" one's hair is a lot more common than to "color" one's hair. In a large English corpus, "dye + hair" appears about six times as often as "color + hair". Also, if you check Google Trends, you'll see that "dye your hair" is searched for about seven times more than "color your hair" (with scores of 79 and 11, respectively)

This data supports my impression as a native speaker: "color" is what people say in advertisements, and "dye" is what people say in real life.

And, as others have noted, "aggravate" is transitive. You have to say that "something aggravated something" or (in passive construction) "something was aggravated."

Color one's hair vs dye one's hair

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