The chemicals and high temperatures many people expose their hair to regularly can cause serious and irreparable hair damage. If you’re one of those people and now need to take extra care of your hair to prevent further damage but don’t want to have to stop dyeing your hair, this article will explain to you how you can continue to color your hair while causing minimum damage to it.
Step One
Trouble for Hair? - Hair has been called "our crowning glory," but apparently women don't like their hair because more women are changing the color of their hair than ever before. But is this obsession with finding the perfect color bad for our hair? The answer is: It depends.
Step Two
What's In It? - The three types of hair color --- permanent, semi-permanent and temporary --- all have chemicals in varying levels. The permanent colors are obviously meant to last longer and, according to the Food and Drug Administration, they are broken up into two categories: oxidation dye or progressive dyes. The oxidation type becomes a dye after a chemical reaction with hair. The progressive type are dyes themselves but need additives to get to the desired shade; some of the chemicals used to do that are ammonia, soap and detergent, a conditioner and hydrogen peroxide. What you generally see in the box are a developer and an ammonia-based dye that are mixed together to form a cream.
Step Three
What Happens to Hair? - The cream dye mixture makes the hair shaft swell to accept the color and process further. Certain ingredients that do this are metallic lead and bismuth citrate --- and in proscribed doses that are approved as safe. Our hair has keratin and it's the sulfur within that oxidizes with the chemicals, causing a color change.
Step Four
Lesser Color Products - Another category of color -- semi-permanent and temporary color -- have coal tar (an antiquated way of saying "petroleum") that sticks to the hair shaft and leaves behind color. Inside this mixture are coal tar dyes, organic solvents --- salts or vegetable substances, gums, wetting agents called "surfactants" and conditioning ingredients.
Step Five
Your Caveat - In your color box will be a pair of plastic gloves and a cap (optional), but there will generally be a cautionary warning. This protects the manufacturer, but it also protects you. There are two main instructions with this warning: to do a preliminary test on your skin before proceeding, and to refrain from trying to color eyelashes or eyebrows, which can cause blindness.
Step Six
Problems Associated with Hair Dyes - Hair dyes have caused bad reactions among some people like redness, itchy or irritated skin, burning, hair loss and -- with an extreme allergic reaction -- facial swelling and labored breathing.
Step Seven
Long-Term Damage - The FDA has backed off of approving coal tar dyes; if the box has the patch test instructions, that's all it needs. The problem with continued use however, is that someone can develop an allergy later on in life. Another problem to the hair emerges when women have their hair straightened and colored, too. Also, overuse of dyes, dye sitting too long to develop, and other variables can damage hair. This will typically mean breaks in the shaft of the hair. Under a microscope, a hair is not smooth but appears to have scales. These are proteins called keratins, in three different layers. Most dye can penetrate the layers, causing hair to dry out, produce fly-aways and create breakage that makes for open spots in the scalp. Most of these poor results are not permanent, however. If you stop the coloring, hair should grow back. And the outer layer --- the cuticle --- has the scales; so when it accepts conditioning agents, it will get smoother.