Getting to know your hair colour!
Ever wondered what it takes to get from the darkest colour to the lightest colour or versa. When sitting in the salon chair? Often we see colour disasters online but there’s a science to everything when it comes to hairdressing.
Hair colour levels describe how light or dark a person’s hair is. They run from 1 to 10, with 1 being the darkest black and 10 being the lightest blonde. They’re common in the hair-colouring industry.
When you dye your hair darker, you’re adding colour to it. Melanin, a natural pigment found in the cortex of the hair shaft and visible through the translucent scales of the cuticle, determines hair colour. The cuticle is opened when colour is applied, allowing pigment molecules to penetrate the cortex.
Black, brown, red, and yellow are the four natural hair colour pigments. Level is determined by black and brown colours, whereas tone is determined by red and yellow pigments. No matter what colour or level of hair they have, every pigment is present in varying proportions in their hair.
The size of pigment molecules varies from darkest to lightest, with black being the largest. One of the most important aspects in the chemistry of getting darker is the size of the molecule.
Another approach to see how darker colour looks are to use a semi-permanent hair gloss. Gloss coating the hair shaft rather than penetrating the cuticle, making it a non-permanent modification that complements existing colour and tone.
Consider the black and brown pigment molecules as bricks, and the red and yellow molecules as mortar, as they pass through the open cuticle and into the cortex.
When you move from light to dark in one fell swoop, the large molecules vastly outnumber the smaller, lighter ones, resulting in an unstable structure, similar to a brick wall with insufficient mortar. The darker pigments will typically wash out without the lighter molecules to fill in the gaps, giving a muddy tint.
