How Do Hair Highlighting Products Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Amelia on behalf of expertvillage.com I'll be talking about highlighting at home. The chemistry of decolorizing is very simple and it's good to understand this because of your highlighting process. What you do is after you mixed up the product and put it on your head what the lightener basically does is swell the hair shaft go into the hair shaft and eat the color off the melanin. It's basically think of like alka seltzer and when you put alka seltzer in water and it starts to fizz that is the same type of reaction that happens to your hair when you apply a lightener to it. If I apply bleach to this strand right here and I leave it there all day it's going to eventually be this color or eventually fall off. But first it will be this color, now all you need to worry about when using lightener is that that melanin starts to come up and it becomes light like this. If you use color however you have the same process your target is just a little bit different. Let's say you wanted to be red and you would decolorize to a red where as with the bleach you would just put that on and it would eat the melanin away to a nice blond. That is the chemistry of decolorizing."