The structure of the hair

Are you scratching your head about why the color doesn't turn out the way you want? We are here to give you insight into what happens during a color treatment. How the theory is connected to how the result is. Hydrogen peroxide (h2o2) is always mixed with bleaching powder or a color tube, this gives you a form of lightening of the hair. When a hair lightens, the cold pigments will always disappear from the hair first.

All hair strands are made up of the primary colors Red, Yellow and Blue. It is the amount of primary color that determines the pitch of the hair. We have a pitch scale, a table with all the pitches. This scale goes from 1 – 10 where 1 is black and 10 is platinum blonde. All natural hair colors can be found in the table.

To the right of the pitch scale a table that shows the underlying warm pigments of the pitches. This table is called an Underlay Table.

When a strand of hair is lightened, with natural or artificial lightening, the blue pigment always disappears first and the warm pigments become visible. The base table shows the amount of yellow, orange and red pigments that are naturally present in the hair. This explains why hair is perceived as more golden/warm after a sunny summer. Or why hair turns golden when lightening. From dark to light hair, you will visit this entire table on the way to blonde hair.

When working with bleaching, the blue pigment will be gone within 2 minutes and only the warm pigments will remain. When working with hair color, a higher strength of h2o2 will give more lightening and thus the warm pigments will become more visible. The warm shades can be neutralized, then the complementary color is used. The complementary color is the color that is above in the color star. Read more about the color star here