What is the purpose of Hydrogen Peroxide and Ammonia in hair color?
While most of you might know this, many of you might not. So in this Hair Color Wednesday we thought we would break it down!
First of all before we begin to understand the purpose of Hydrogen Peroxide and Ammonia we should understand how they work and then we can look at the why!
So in basic here is how it works:
Ammonia – causes the pH of the hair to rise and allows the hair to swell, opening the cuticle layer and causing the hair to be more susceptible to oxygen and dye molecules.
Hydrogen Peroxide – increases the level of oxidation within the hair strand, causing the natural melanin to shrink; in turn creating a lighter color.
So what this means is this:
The combination of Hydrogen Peroxide and Ammonia raise the pH of your hair and increase the levels of oxidation within the hair, causing the natural pigment to lighten. In hair color this includes artificial dye molecules.
As the natural melanin shrinks, it visibly becomes lighter. Once the natural melanin becomes lighter, the artificial pigment will begin to cover over the natural pigment, creating a new hue, saturation and tone of color.
This is why in hair color always trust your color wheel. Every time you lighten hair more than 1 level look at it as if it is color correction (in a theory base form). It doesn’t matter whether you want to enhance or control the natural pigment, you still need to understand what your dealing with.
So are you still a little confused? – That’s O.K if you said yes….
Lets make it simple!
Like in painting, you can not paint a black wall pink without priming it right!? Same thing with hair color. A lighter color will not show through a darker color. So in a sense your Ammonia and Hydrogen Peroxide are kind of like your primers. If you wanting a lighter result than the natural hair color, you need to use the combo of Ammonia and Peroxide to lighten and then “tone” the hair. (*Please note there are alternatives to Ammonia – for this articles sake we are focusing on Ammonia only).
So it’s that simple.
Ammonia is the car.
Hydrogen Peroxide is the gas.
You can’t color hair without using them both!
[...] In hair color, the one thing that will never change is that we need some type of alkaline derivative to raise the pH of the hair strand, to allow the hair color dye molecules to enter inside of the hair. In the past as many of you know, hair color lines have used ammonia to act as this alkaline catalyst. (Check out THIS “did you know” we did on how ammonia works in hair color.) [...]
[...] remember a few weeks back we talked about what happens to hair color when it’s being colored. If you missed it, read it here! But basically the most important thing to know is this – Permanent hair color lightens the [...]