7 Salon Hair Lightening & Hair Coloring Facts
Lightening or changing your hair color can be an instant confidence booster. It can make you feel younger, sexier and more vibrant.
Changing your natural locks to another shade is one of the fastest ways of transforming yourself, whether you do it for the weekend, a few weeks or even years.
You probably know all about the process of coloring your hair, but you may not have given much thought to the facts about hair dyeing and hair lightening until now.
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Hair Coloring Agents
You can only change your hair color in three ways:
- it can be made lighter
- it can be made darker
- it can be changed to an entirely different hue
Coloring agents for hair are of four main types: temporary hair color, natural colorings, semi-permanent dyes, and permanent dyes.
Hair Facts
Hair has two primary pigments: melanin, also known as eumelanin, and pheomelanin. Melanin is brown-black, and pheomelanin is a red pigment.
Melanin also gives your skin its unique hue or color. There are also two minor pigments, yellow oxymelanin and brown melanin, which isn't the same as brown-black melanin.
The proportion of each pigment is what determines your hair color. If you have high levels of brown-black melanin, you'll have black hair, but higher levels of pheomelanin cause you to have blond hair.
Proper Care and Treatment
Whether you'd like to have your hair lightened by a professional at hair salons, or prefer to master the challenge at home, you must treat your hair with care.
Here are three ways to keep your hair healthy between salon visits:
- Applying deep conditioners and gentle shampoos made specifically for chemically treated hair can keep your tresses as healthy as possible.
- Minimizing heat styling also protects your hair from damage.
- Get regular trims to remove dry ends and keep your hair gorgeous.
How Lightening Works
The oxidizing agents in bleach take part in a chemical reaction with melanin. They provide the melanin molecule with oxygen from their own molecules. The oxidized melanin molecule is colorless.
Melanin is contained in the cortex of the hair. For the oxidizing agent to reach the melanin, therefore, it has to get through the cuticle. In the alkaline solution of the bleach formulation, the scales of the cuticle are raised and the bleach chemicals can then penetrate the cortex.
The process of dyeing or lightening your hair alters the levels of each pigment in your hair, and can also damage the hair shaft, which can result in crunchy locks that require some serious conditioning after color treating.
The Stages of Lightening Hair
Your natural hair color changes as it is lightened, as the stylist removes more eumelanin and then phaeomelanin step-by-step.
For example, if a jet-black haired client decides she would like to become a platinum blonde in less than a few hours, her stylist would have to use the most powerful bleaching chemicals to transform her tresses.
They would certainly damage her hair to a marked extent. It would be less damaging to carry out the process in several stages – up to a dozen, perhaps.
During that time her hair would change from black to red, and then lighten gradually from red to orange, then orange to yellow, and finally from yellow to white. Some of the stages might well have to be repeated.
The stylist might decide that a three-step or five-step program would be possible, changing first from black to red, then from red to yellow, and finally to white.
What has to be considered before any final decision is taken is how to keep damage to the cuticle to a minimum, and above all what will be the final effect of the program on the quality of the hair.
Testing the Waters
Hair dyes are versatile, and you can be blond for a night or for months, depending on what type of hair dye you choose.
Temporary hair colors are acidic and only deposit on the outside of the hair, so they can be washed away in just a few days.
Semipermanent hair dyes are often used for highlighting and removing gray.
They have smaller molecules and enter the hair more easily, but are also easier to wash away because of the molecules' small size. Expect semipermanent dyes to last six to 12 weeks.
Totally Committed
Lightening, or bleaching, your hair tends to last longer because the dyeing agent penetrates and changes the hair's cortex to oxidize, or lighten, the melanin by degrading it. This means you usually have to let the dyed hair grow out and cut it off to get rid of the alterations.
Permanent hair color works the same way. It changes your hair chemically, and the changes are irreversible.You have to dye it again — or live with it 'til it grows out enough to whack it off — if you hate the results.
