Color me.

So Sundays at the salon are pretty awesome; it's just me and my boss Greg that come in, so we always have the whole place to ourselves. Well we had this one client in today, she's a good client of Greg's and he always does some fun block coloring on her. Last time she was in he did a medley of cool red tones that had since faded to a red-orange that we all decide still looked pretty good! So instead of doing an cool reds/red violets Greg used some orange reds, and it turned out awesome. It got me started thinking a lot about color today; when I look at a color chart my eyes never really go towards the orange/yellow end of the spectrum (I've always despised the color yellow since childhood), but maybe I should really stop discriminating and start experimenting with some hot orange hues!

A couple weeks ago Greg gave me a copy of his old educator's manual from when he worked as a Paul Mitchell educator/artist,, and it's fascinating. It's really inspired me to try out new colors and really learn color as a science as well as an art. You can't mix hair colors like water colors, and you can't use the same color on two different heads of hair and expect the same results (this is reason #1 of 14bajiliion why drugstore box color is a bad idea!). Everyone's hair adds that certain X-factor into the mix, and that's determined by a few key properties of the hair.

But before we get into that lemme explain a bit about hair works (his is where I pull out a white-board, Bill Nye style). The shaft of each individual hair has three basic layers: the medulla, the cortex, and the cuticle. The medulla is just the core of your hair, it's not really involved in any of the color process, and a lot of natural blondes or people with fine hair lack medullas altogether! The cuticle is kinda like the shingles on a roof, little overlapping flaps all around the hair than can open and close (when they all lie flat is when you get the silky smooth feeling). The cortex is where all the color in your hair is contained. There are two types of melanin that give your hair your individual shade: eumelanin, a darker melanin that makes brown/black shades, and phaeomelanin, which is responsible for blondes and redheads. Anyone can have any mixture of these two pigments, and it can even vary within an individual! For example, my hair is a medium brown (a mix of both melanins), but my beard grows in with a lot of blonde and red hairs (no eumelanin!), and my eyebrows are much darker than everything else (more eumelanin)!




So when you go to a salon and we make a color for you, we mix together two basic components, a developer and the actual color. This mixture contains ammonia, dye intermediates, and hydrogen peroxide. Ammonia in my hair, ew! Why? Ammonia is the agent that opens up the cuticle layer and allows the color to penetrate into the cortex of the hair, the main battleground for the reaction. Once in the hair the hydrogen peroxide attacks the melanin in your hair and breaks it down into pigmentless molecules, releasing sulfur into the air (which is why with some color lines you get that nasty smell). While this is going on the hydrogen peroxide has also activated the dye intermediates and create the new color molecules to deposit into your cortex!
This is why when you dye your hair even a darker color it can fade lighter than your natural color, because you're destroying some of your natural pigmentation before the artificial color goes into your hair, so once all this new pigment fades out, your left with just the natural pigment that was spared by the peroxide.

So the major benefit of salon color really is that we can customize each of these individual components that go into a hair color. We pick a developer that the right amount of hydrogen peroxide to give your hair the best base to deposit your new color onto and create a shade that'll take into account the properties of the natural pigment of your hair (since peroxide doesn't strip it all out). Your hair is like no one else's, and can and should reflect that!

This can be a jarring process on your hair, and that's why choosing the right color line is also important. When I was younger at my mom's shop she used to use Goldwell. My hair is naturally pin straight and very soft, I never had to use conditioner if I didn't feel like it, and I found after even one color service my hair felt dry and matte. You can't always totally avoid this (no matter what color you use you're chemically opening and closing your cuticle), but there are definitely some lines out there that help to minimize the effects. That why at my salon we offer Paul Mitchell the color. It's got the lowest amount of ammonia of any color line, so it's not blasting the cuticle open like other lines do sometimes, it's much more gentle. It's also a beeswax base so it's conditioning your hair while the color is being done (and it makes the color really thick, so we can give you a big spike while you're processing, all punk-rock style), and there's menthol in it (same stuff as in halls!), so you don't get it's aromatherapeutic and you don't get that headache from the sulfur smell.

And when you've got a good line to work with it makes it that much more fun cause you get to focus on the fun part; the best part for me is always getting to play matchmaker and finding the formula that'll get along with my client's hair's individual personality, to reflect my client's personality! =)


Book your color experience!: i'm available sundays/wednesday/thursdays for bookings! call GREG MAY HAIR ARCHITECTS at 416 920-8892 to make your appointment! [cuts/colors start at $55]

Stay tuned for the upcoming entries on hair color: [Different Types of Color: Permanent vs. Semi-perm vs. Demi-Perm], [What is purple shampoo?]