By Hair By Design
The active ingredients of the vast majority of hair treatment chemicals raises the pH of the hair so that the structure of the hair can be altered by other ingredients of the treatment. PH is a scale of how acid or alkaline something is. A neutral pH on this scale is “7″. A value of “0″ pH would be very acid, and a value of “14″ would be extremely alkaline.
In other words, chemicals applied to hair are designed to make it very alkaline, which allows the hair to be permanently colored or curled or straightened, depending on the other ingredients in the solution.
Simple heat alone does not alter the structure. I watch my best friend curl her hair with a blow dryer and curling wand every 2.5 days; I don’t think we have to belabor the point on this.
Temporary colors are temporary because they do not significantly alter the structure of the hair. If you’ve used any temporary color, you can see it wash down the drain over the next few times you wash your hair. The color solution does not penetrate the cortex of the hair but stays on the cuticle.
Where permanents do not work, where hair color does not last, it is because
| - | these products do not effectively alter the hair’s structure, or |
| - | the hair structure is missing the necessary ingredient to work with the chemical |
What is that necessary ingredient?
Protein!
Your natural hair is composed of (x) amount of protein. That amount did not change until you chemically altered your hair. So, what the heck happened?
When you dyed, permed or relaxed your hair, the chemical, in order to make the desired change in the structure, destroyed protein in the
process.
If you looked at hair under a microscope while it is being exposed to hair treatment chemicals, you would see actual explosions on and in the hair as the chemical destroys the protein! The alkaline chemical burns through some of the protein of the cuticle, lifts the cuticle, and goes to work on the protein cortex of the hair.
Depending on the strength of the chemical, the length of time the hair is exposed to it, and other factors relating to the hair itself, part of the protein is literally burned up in the process.
Each time you use the chemical treatment, it actually destroys up to 50% of the protein of your hair! In other words, the first treatment you lost 50% of the protein of your hair. The next time you treated your hair, you lost 50% of the remainder, and so on, until eventually you have lost virtually all the protein of your hair and the structure of the hair itself has been significantly compromised.
This magnified photo shows a strand of hair that has not been chemically processed.
The image on right shows a strand of hair that has been damaged due to chemical processing.
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