How Hair Dye Colors Hair

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Amelia and on behalf of Expert Village, I'll be talking to you about understanding the laws of hair color. So now that we know how to color hair, let's talk about how it works. And this is important to know, because if you know how something works, then you understand the process, and then you know how to counteract that process if something goes wrong. Always know the rules first before you break them. How hair color works is you use, you mix your hair color and then your developer, which is the catalyst. It creates a chemical reaction, and that swells the hair shaft. We're pretty much discussing permanent hair color right now. That's going to swell that hair shaft. The hair color then goes into the hair shaft, and the first fifteen minutes, it's actually destroying the pigment on the melenan. So, it's eating away the color on the melenan, and it's only going to eat it away to a certain level, because of the strength of the peroxide. The more peroxide you use, the more melenan that's going to be eaten away. So, the cuticle layer, which is the outer layer, that's translucent, and the permanent color does stain that. When color fades, that stain on the outside layer washes off. So that's what washes down the drain. And what you're left with is the inside color. So that's that remaining color. So when permanent color fades, what your left with is remaining color. When you retouch your color and you pull that color back through the ends, you're restaining that cuticle. So that's very important. If you do that too much, then you over stain the cuticle and the cuticle starts absorbing too much color and that's how you get those dark ends, and the super light roots. Bleach works in very much the same way except it doesn't deposit, it only lightens. So the bleach goes in, eats the melenan, and however long you leave that bleach on, it's going to keep lightening. And it stops at a certain point when the highest amount of underlying pigment is there. So that's usually gold, orange, yellow, somewhere in those really yucky colors. So that bleach goes in, eats away that melenan, and then you wash it down the drain, and what you're left with is a blonde. So that's how permanent color works, and bleach. "