Favourite Hair-Styling Procedures That Cause Hair Damage
People can sometimes push the boundaries too far within the pursuit of gorgeous hair. Too much straightening without heat protection, over colouring when your hair has reached its limits!! Damaged hair can be brittle and often break. You may have frizzy, unhealthy-looking hair as a result of over doing things.
The outer layer of hair, the cuticle, becomes damaged and lifts, chipping and wearing down. The ordinarily overlapping cells that you would find in healthy hair, no longer lie flat. This causes coarse, dull strands that are prone to tangling because rough cuticle scales prevent the strands from gliding past one another.
As a result, you often have to pull more forcefully to get that brush through, further destroying the hair shaft and making it more brittle and prone to breaking.
The Most Severe Harm Occurs at the Molecular Level
Bonds that support your hair’s strength and elasticity are broken when you colour, perm, or relax it. This takes place in the cortex, the hair’s deeper layer. Selectively breaking and re-forming disulphide bonds enables hair to be bent into new shapes via chemical shaping procedures like perms or relaxers.
Stylists are able to lighten or deposit colour thanks to the chemical agents used in bleaching and colouring processes. Unfortunately, these chemicals can also degrade the polypeptide chains that give hair its fundamental elasticity and strength. Hair will not feel as wonderful and will not look as good with its structure so disrupted.
Below, we will look at how our favourite hair-styling services can damage hair over time.
Hair Colouring
Ammonia, a common ingredient in hair dyes, elevates the pH of hair and causes the cuticle (the outer layer) to swell considerably. When the cuticle is swells it begins to open. This allows dye molecules to enter the hair cortex where they can attach to colour hair permanently.
Peroxides are utilised to oxidise the smaller dye molecules into larger ones that cannot leave the cortex, similar to bleaching. Unfortunately, when not managed correctly, oxidising chemicals are difficult to control and may harm peptide and disulphide bonds in hair.
Perming
Hair is broken down and restructured using heat and/or chemicals in perms. Hair is placed in curlers, and a reducing chemical—usually ammonium thioglycolate—is added in a normal cold perm. The thioglycolate substance splits the disulphide bonds in keratin, releasing the individual cysteines.
Cysteines are permitted to re-connect to the disulfides in the new curl shape, securing it in place as the keratin molecules adapt to the new curl shape. This occurs gradually over time due to the oxygen in the air, which is why—traditionally—hair was not supposed to be washed for a few days after a perm.
Hair Relaxing
These chemically straighten hair. Similar to a perm, they function by piercing the hair’s cuticle and cortex to break and reorganise the disulphide connections between molecules. However, their purpose is to loosen the natural curl pattern rather than to create one.
The hair is straightened using combing and heat. Then the chemical bonds holding the hair together in its new shape are reformed using a hydrogen peroxide neutralising solution.
When harmful chemicals like hydroxides are employed in place of glycolates, the method can leave hair weak, brittle, and prone to breakage, just like with perms.
Heat Styling
The hydrogen bonds that hold the keratin chains are broken and then reconstructed in a different place as a result of this process. Through this procedure, the keratin chains can migrate around a little bit and take on a temporary position, straightening the hair.
Because hydrogen bonds are rapidly broken while hair is wet, this type of style typically doesn’t persist through your next shampoo. Unfortunately, using too much heat weakens the cortex and harms the keratin chains, leaving hair dry, dull, or frizzy.
Conclusion
You frequently run your hair through several styles. You might not see it in post-styling or chemical services, but there is more behind the scenes that can permanently damage your hair.
However, true rejuvenation is achievable if you comprehend how, where, and most significantly, how to access the damage. In order to preserve strength, softness, smoothness, and bounce in your hair, you must study damage at a scientific level to discover a solution that grasps the biology of your hair.
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