Cynical Girl sez…I have over-highlighted my hair and it’s fried. The salon recommended a Redken All Softconditioning treatment and another Redken protein treatment. Will any of these products really make a difference, or do I just need to cut off the damaged ends of my hair? Is it possible to add too much moisture or protein to my hair? Any risks?
The Right Brain replies:
Cynical Girl – it looks like you’ve committed the cardinal sin of chemically caring for your hair: you over-processed. But, rather than publicly berating you here on the Beauty Brains blog, we’ll give you some information that will help save your hair.
Is protein powerful?
Your stylist recommended a couple of Redkin products. There’s certainly nothing wrong with using those – the All Soft conditioner is a fine product that could mitigate some of the damage you’ve done to your hair. I’m not really sure you would necessarily need to use the protein treatment since protein aren’t typically a significant active ingredient in conditioner formulas. Although your hair is made of protein (keratin protein to be precise), protein delivered from a conditioner doesn’t really help that much. There are other conditioning and moisturizing agents that are more beneficial to your hair than proteins. Still, if you don’t mind spending the money on those Redkin products they’re certainly worth a shot.
You just need to be careful that you don’t over condition your hair or else you might end up with limp lifeless locks. Which leads us to the second part of your question. Can you add too much moisture or protein to your hair? The answer is: “Not exactly.” Let us explain.
Moisture is magic
One of the components of your hair is moisture – in fact your hair naturally contains between 8 and 14 percent water. But, and here is the tricky part, your hair naturally equilibrates to the humidity in your environment. In other words if it’s very dry outside you will have less moisture than 8 to 14 percent in your hair and if it’s very humid you’ll have more. Think about your hair after you wash it or after you’ve gone swimming. It doesn’t stay wet – it eventually does dry out.
On the other hand, you do need to watch out for adding too much moisturizer. A moisturizer is an ingredient that helps your hair hold onto moisture. Strictly speaking, moisture is water but moisturizers can be oils or silicones. And if you put too much of these materials on your hair you can get on build up or weigh down effect, which is not good, especially if you want your hair to look thick and full.
The Beauty Brains bottom line
We don’t discourage you from trying the Redken products, but you may find you don’t like them. If this happens, you’ll have to experiment with a few other conditioners to find one that gives you the right balance of moisture without weighdown. But at least now, hopefully we’ve given you have a better understanding of HOW your conditioner works. And by the way, don’t you dare wash your hair without conditioning – at least for the next few weeks. You’ve got to protect your fragile, over-processed strands.
What do YOU think? What are you favorite products for dealing with over-stressed tresses? Leave a comment and share your secrets with the rest of the Beauty Brains community.
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I use Feria to dye my hair and my mum regularly helps me. One night she left it on for about five minutes too long and my hair was completely fried. That five minutes made a big difference! I used Three-Minute Miracle by Aussie and that really helped make my hair manageable again and it only cost about $3.00. You might want to try that before spending all that money on Redkin.
Really? The whole protein for damaged hair is just a lie?? I really do trust you guys but that is just such a widespread belief.
Is this article bogus too then? Or is it talking about a different protein than what you guys meant?
http://thenaturalhaven.blogspot.com/2009/06/size-matters-protein-conditioning-part.html
There is a reason why obtaining a cosmo license takes time and lots of education, because hair is complicated. As a professional educator for advanced training in the beauty industry, I’ve heard so many of my fellow beauty professionals get the theory of proteins wrong. Unfortunately, this blog is as well.
The human hair strand is made of 90% protein, keratin. Protein gives the hair strength and resistance to damage. The outer layer of the strand, called the cuticle, is 100% protein, no moisture. When a hair strand is chemically damaged, it has lost or weakened much of the protein that fortifies it. When hair is chemically damaged, it must have protein reintroduced to prevent further breakage. Also, without protein, the hair strand cannot hold moisture, which gives it suppleness. Moisture does nothing for chemical damage.
Redken all soft is moisture only (avocado oil), the extreme line is a much better choice for it provides the hair with wheat proteins, the closest to keratin without a change in color.
With continued use the extreme line or Joico’s K-Pak, you will find that the damage to your hair will begin to reverse, but you will still need regular haircuts to remove the damage permanently.
Also, beware of the things you read on the internet. A pretty page and a willingness to blog does not an expert make. See a trusted hair expert for the best advice.
@Sarah – You misunderstood the post. We didn’t say the whole protein thing was a lie. We said there are more effective conditioners than proteins. Proteins are added more for the story than for the actual benefit. They do have the ability to adsorb to the hair but once there, they do not provide a greater conditioning benefit than other conditioning ingredients like cationic conditioning agents.
@Cricket – You’re correct that people should be skeptical of things they read on the Internet. They should also be skeptical of things they are taught in cosmo school. Science classes is the place to learn about the science of cosmetic products.
What specifically did this blog get wrong about hair protein?
Without protein, there is no hair. Hair IS protein!
Can you please show us your evidence that hair needs protein reintroduced onto it to reinforce its strength? A scientific study would be preferred.
thanks
Having fried my hair with an oooooold hairdryer and having tried every deep treatment under the sun in the aftermath of the frying, I can counsel that time, avoidance of heat styling (hello, air drying!), and judicious cutting are your best hope when it comes to recovering the health of your hair.
I love Redken products, they have done great things for my hair. My recent switch to better-quality shampoo has made a huge difference in my hair. I have also cut back on blow drying and styling with heat and I can already tell a noticeable difference and improvement in my hair. Redken is great and I highly recommend it to anyone!
Ok, I need some help. My daughter has chemially over processed hair. I know that there is no quick fix & that her hair need to grow out with out any more processing to become healthy again. However is there anything I can do in the mean time to stop the breakage & dryness. Her poor hair is brittle & breaking so bad. Bad me for not choosing a better salon that knows properly how to touch up a relaxer verses reappling it to the whole head. She is miserable & so am I knowing that for an 11 year old image is alot. I just need to know how to help keep it from breaking off so much & get it back healthy & moisturized. Please if you have advice let me know. To make matters worse she has been using Nuetragena T-gell as her regular shampoo once a week without a folow up moisturizer. So yes her hair is clean but it is aloso BONE DRY. Any items to promote hair growth to help the new grow -grow faster & healthier? Thank you for your advice(and scolding) [email protected]
”hair naturally equilibrates to the humidity in your environment”
Does it mean we should ignore all the advices given to curlies about using water very often in their hair to keep it moisturized ? what is the purpose of doing that if we lose the water anyway. When i use glycerine in the summer to attract water, I end up with frizzies. I can not use it during the winter time because it is dry and it will attract the water from the hair if the air do not contain it. When do i use glycerine then?
Until a few days ago, I didn’t know much about hair conditioning, except that I always used a companion conditioner with whatever shampoo I was using.
I didn’t know that there were two kinds of conditioning, one with moisture, one with proteins (though they can both appear in a product, obviously).
Due to no fault of my own – I airdry my hair, never use styling tools, use a wide-tooth comb only, don’t apply styling products, don’t braid or pin my hair – my long, healthy, shiny, plain, simple, naturally straight dark blond hair began to break off like crazy last week. I mean, in the last 7 days, 50% of my hair has broken off, and it looks a mess. The breaks appeared at every length of my 15 inches of hair, not just in one spot. The broken hairs range from near the bottom to 1/2 inch from my scalp. This is not hair loss, where the hair is falling from the scalp. It’s breakage. The only thing I’ve done is try a few new shampoos out because my old standby shampoo for the last 10 years has been discontinued and I need to find another brand. Well, one of those shampoos (I said in another post here that I feel it was the Paul Mitchell super skinny shampoo) — with absolutely no change in my routine this year: no hair drying, no hair styling, no hair tugging, no hair chemical treatments, nothing this year — dried out my hair last week until it felt like straw and then it all started breaking off. I tried 2 hot oil treatments, I called to book consultations at 2 salons, I stopped using all of the new shampoos immediately and went back to the last few ounces I had of my former shampoo that is now impossible to find in the stores. Nothing helped – my hair kept breaking.
The stylists were absolutely baffled as to why my hair suddenly started breaking off last week. (I really think that they thought I must be lying when I told them that last week, it was so healthy and strong!) They both could not accept that any shampoo could have done this to me, but I know that trying out a few shampoos in the last month is the only thing about my haircare that has changed in many years… if I air-dry, don’t style, don’t use appliances, haven’t chemically-treated, etc., what else can it be?
The stylists thought that I actually shouldn’t cut the length off, because the damage is all the way to my scalp, so they can’t even cut it short to a point where it looks healthy, plus they said that the length makes it look better in this particular situation than a layered, short style would look.
The stylists I consulted with recommended I use products with protein in them, to restore the resiliency of my hair strands. Their salons actually were out of stock of their protein repair lines that they recommended (one was Redken’s extreme line, one was Pureology something or other), so I went to a beauty supply store in my town and got some protein-containing products for damaged hair, including aphogee’s 2 minute reconstructor, a product that is supposed to be identical to joico k-pak, and aphogee damaged hair shampoo. Yesterday I did the 2 minute reconstructor and this morning I washed with the damaged hair shampoo, and the difference is AMAZING.
My hair at the start of yesterday looked a MESS. Broken off ends all over, half the strands and volume it used to have, ends were sticking up everywhere – my scalp looked like it had a mini mohawk cut because of the hundreds and hundreds of hairs at my part on top that are now only an inch long (on 15 inch hair) and sticking straight up – nothing will make them lie down, not wax, not gel, not serum, not hairspray (I tried every product I could find in my relatives’ bathrooom cabinet yesterday morning to see if anything would keep those hairs down). My hair is very thin (each strand) and it never stays put if there are flyaways/short hairs, so even though I have straight hair and not curly hair, I’ve got the frizzies like anything. It looks so unkempt, and actually appears like I must have a bad physical illness. It also looks like I’ve taken 100% bleach to it or tried to iron it too much or something, but I haven’t done anything to it like that – that’s the unfair part.
But after the reconstructor and the damaged hair shampoo (1 time use, so far), my hair looks so much better than it did yesterday. There are still lots of ends sticking up, and it looks terribly damaged, but there are 80% fewer ends sticking up than there were yesterday, and it looks sleeker, feels smoother, and looks halfway presentable now (instead of I-have-to-wear-a-hat-for-the-next-18-months awful like it did yesterday). It’s nothing like the lovely, simple, totally healthy hair I’ve had all my life up until last week, but at least it doesn’t look freakish today, like it did yesterday. (Today it just looks like I’ve got run-of-the-mill damaged hair like many other ladies do, and not like I’m a cartoon character who stuck her finger in an electrical socket.)
The protein reconstructor and the damaged hair shampoo have made a huge difference to my hair in just one use of each product. I TOTALLY believe in the hype about protein now. Before a few days ago, I’d never really known about protein for hair – I had never needed to know.
So if you are thinking that protein products might help your damaged hair, don’t believe a few naysayers — please do some internet research of what hair stylists, hair product companies, and everyday women who are suffering from damaged hair are saying about protein helping their breaking, dry, brittle hair.
For first reference, you can check out a well-known beauty supply store website that has many customer comments about various products. Yesterday, because I couldn’t purchase the salon lines that day which had been recommended to me, I spent about 2 hours making sure which products I wanted to buy at the beauty supply store by looking at all the reviews and experiences of other customers they have on their website, and I appreciated the details that other customers had gone into. I wasn’t sure that buying a beauty-supply-store brand that hadn’t been mentioned by the stylists would be okay, but I wasn’t willing to wait until the salons ordered in more stock of their name-brand products containing proteins, since my hair was breaking off at an alarming rate each day. I spoke to the manager of the beauty supply store for 20 minutes also, and she thought what I had decided to buy from reading their website’s customer comments were good choices for me.
I have no idea how this is going to turn out – and I haven’t tried the generic K-pak product yet – and I have read that there is such a thing as too MUCH protein, which can start damaging your hair if it’s overused, so I don’t want to go overboard with the protein. The beauty supply store manager recommended I do the damaged hair shampoo every day (along with a moisturizing conditioner), the k-pak generic treatment twice a week, and the recontructor only once every 6 weeks. So I’ll start out on that schedule.
If your hair is breaking off suddenly, at a fast rate, and your attempted solutions haven’t been working, it is absolutely worth trying some protein-containing products meant to help damaged hair. The ones I got at the beauty supply store cost only $5 to $7.
Protein is excellent to repair and re-fortify damaged, brittle hair. No, it won’t moisutrize like fatty alcohols, other humectants, or oils. However it will help mitigate breakage and certainly will assist in ‘filling in’ the gaps. Protein and moisture are two very different things, and hair needs both. You will need to determine for yourself how much of each your hair needs. Protein is good after a caustic chemical service, crash-dieting, heat damage. Add it to your routine a few times per week. If you hair becomes hard and somewhat swollen, cut out the protein completely or use less frequently. Some people’s hair doesn’t like it too often or too much. Moisture is great and comes in lots of forms, it’s hard to get too much, but moisture will NOT repair damage, fill in bonds or mitigate snapping. It will simply add moisture to the shaft, which helps with the feel and manageability of the hair. One way, I’ve heard, to tell if you have had too much moisture is to tug on a single strand, and if it snaps or breaks, you need moisture. If it is gummy/stretchy – you need protein. This site is great but not always accurate or elaborate in it’s musings.
I agree with CS, if your hair is damaged, the only way to get it healthy again is to wait for it to regrow and protect it from further damage with conditioners and avoidance of processing and high heat. I also would like to see a scientific study showing that hair (which is dead) can integrate protein that is applied to its surface and become “re-fortified.”
I’m in hairstyling school at the moment, and although that damage is permanant, the moisturizers and protiens (im guessing the protien one was redken extreme, which i really do reccomend) will fill in the damaged and missing parts of the hair cuticle creating a healthier look and preventing damage. i would also reccomend the kpax treatment by joico. although the damage you have is permanent, this will deffinately make your hair feel healthier, and when your preventing breakage it will seem to grow faster. i doubt you can have too much moisture, overprocessed hair can’t really get greasy usually other than just at the roots.
hi, i just want to ask if Revlon hair treatment is effective and beneficial to re-bonded hair? how it will works with my hair?thanks.
K-Pak is the best thing around. Ive done pretty much everything to my hair, i know wasssup