Scott Breed
Active Member
Interesting, I saw the experiment on fb but diddnt read the write up, I wasn't aware of the knock offs but am glad you've said about them I would probably try them at some point lol, I'm increasingly interested in how the chemistry behind it works, whilst observing a perm today it occurred to me that the neutraliser was re forming the purposefully broken disulphide bonds, and apparantly that's what olaplex does... My thoughts are tho and correct me if I'm wrong here but I thought colour affected the hair everywhere but the disulphide bonds? Thus we don't need to use neutraliser when colouring, so why are we reparing bonds that haven't nessecarily been broken? Or am I getting the wrong end of things here? I thought the chemicals in perm solution were the ones nessecary to break disulphide bonds and the chemicals in neutraliser are the ones that reform? I haven't gotten my head in a text book for quite a while so I could be way off but do u see where I'm coming from?
Kahuna Hair, you are right about the perming process. The processing lotion of a permanent wave reduces (cleaves with Hydrogen) the cystine bond and the neutralizer oxidizes (reforms by removing the Hydrogen) cystine bond. That is not what bond builders do. The cystine bond can be broken with oxidation that occurs during the coloring and lightening process and that is what causes a lot of the damage in these processes. The same thing can be caused in permanent waving and is often called "over neutralizing".
As of for adding perm neutralizer to your color to act like a bond builder, you are already doing basically the same thing as the neutralizer of a perm and the developer of a color or bleach are both oxidizers.
Scott Breed
Director of Education
colorpHlex