How Do Chemical Hair Straighteners Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Lauren and I'm here to discuss with you how chemical hair straighteners work. First thing to know of is that your hair is made of keratin. It's a protein that your hair and your nails are both made out of. Within that keratin protein there are three different bonds. Your hydrogen bond, your salt bond and then your disulfide bond. In order to understand how straighteners work, you need to understand why your hair is formed curly. With your disulfide bond, that is what is going to predict what the shape of your hair is going to be and what the texture is going to be. Whether it will be straight or whether it will be curly. There are two sulfur atoms which will stand apart from each other. If you hair is straight, what happens is that those sulfide bonds are very close and they're easily connected so therefore there's a little bend. If you sulfur atoms are far away from each other, in order to create the bond they come closer together. The closer they come to meeting and the further apart they were, the kinkier the curl. So for those sulfur atoms to come with each other, they go close together and then they wind up creating a curl. That is why some people's hair is wavy, some people have very kinky curly hair and some people have a moderate curl. How the actual straightener works is it breaks that disulfide bond up and it encapsulates the sulfur atoms therefore the sulfur atoms can no longer attract to each other. So they will be leaving the hair straight because there is no attractive qualities about them and they are not trying to combine. They do not know that they are there because they can no longer try to attract towards each other because they are encapsulated and they cannot get each other's responses. And that is why hair straighteners work."