Stressing the effects and importance of hair care to bleach clients.

3 minute read

By Anneliese Hesse.

This can be a tricky conversation to navigate, so here's one way of breaking it down, and showing clients how imperative pro hair care really is.

Bleach has two basic jobs to do in order to lighten your hair:


1. Open the cuticles

2. Remove some of the pigments


Both of these cause a degree of damage to the hair.

Let's start with the cuticles.

Think of these as the tiles on your roof that keep everything in your house safe away from the elements outside. One day, a big storm blows in and damages your roof! Not wanting to leave your house exposed, you try to stick the affected tiles back down, but sadly damage has occurred to them and the result just isn't the same.

Opening the cuticles is essential because they act as the doorway to the part of the hair where the pigment lies. Unless these doors are opened, pigments cannot be accessed, or removed.

Removal of pigments is the actual lightening of the hair.

Think of pigments as bricks in a wall. One by one you remove the bricks - light streams through the gaps and makes everything appear lighter!

But your wall no longer stands as strong as it was before.

This doesn't mean your wall will collapse, and it doesn't mean your hair has to break.

But it will have been damaged and it definitely will need extra care to keep it standing tall.

This is where products and good hair habits become a necessity.

Many products contain ingredients to help minimise the damage induced by lightening.

Similarly, application techniques carried out by trained professionals can be used to avoid over-processing the hair.

However, without both opening the cuticles and removing pigments, zero lightening can take place.

And both of these will always leave the hair structurally weaker than it was to start with.