Recently in Permanent Waving Category

When perming hair, the conditioning and deswelling of the hair should be done according to the pH of the hair and its degree of swelling. For example, a high molecular weight cationic polymer conditioner should be applied to the shampooed hair before applying the Reshaping Cream. The pH of the cream is around 9.5 and it is going to increase the pH of the hair. The hair is also going to swell to 30-60% percent leaving the cuticles wide open. Therefore, a cationic conditioning polymer will penetrate into the hair cortex and make hair soft, silky and more combable.

Since some of you may have some general questions lingering about permanent waving, I'll quickly go over some generalities that might some common issues:

Let us take a look at the basic chemistry of permanent waving (technically called the "redox" process) to understand how hair is permanently curled or waved.

The redox process has two basic phases: reduction and oxidation. During the reduction phase, approximately 20% of the hair's cystine bonds are broken into cysteine (or half cystine bonds). It is in this phase that the hair assumes its new configuration. In the oxidation phase, 80-90% of the broken bonds are reformed to lock in the new curl formations.

I recently received a request for more information about permanent waving, which I must admit, was a bit of a surprise since I haven't noticed many stylists performing the permanent wave service lately.

Avlon's permanent wave system is the Ferm Permanent Waving System, which consists of a 4-step system along with various maintenance products depending on the need.

I figured that it would be nice to start a mini-series on the topic and cover the topic more in-depth.

But before getting down to the chemistry of permanent waving, which is technically my favorite part, its probably a good idea to quickly go over the history of the permanent wave.

Here's a study me and my colleague authored in November 2002 exploring the relationship between porosity and tensile strength of hair fibers.

Over the years, many individual studies have been conducted regarding the extent of damage imparted to hair. These studies deal with the damaging effects of various chemical processes such as permanent waves, permanent colors and hair bleaches.

The most commonly employed method to quantify this damage is the measurement of change in tensile properties of the hair. This method takes two to three days in the preparation of samples of hair fibers. It also requires a minimum of 30 to 40 fibers for statistical analysis. Therefore, there is a need for other simpler methods that are equally valid and less time-consuming.

One such method could be the determination of hair porosity or water uptake of hair fibers as described by Valko et al and by Menkart et al. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study so far has correlated the tensile strength method with the water uptake (swelling/porosity) method following chemical treatments such as permanent
waves, permanent colors, hair bleach, and permanent hair relaxers.

Therefore, we have conducted a study whose purpose was to validate the porosity method against the tensile strength method. Another purpose of this study was to use these two methods to compare the magnitude of hair damage between permanent waving, permanent coloring, hair bleaching, and permanent straightening processes. Finally, this study ranked the various chemical processes in terms of their hair damage potential. We believe this is the first comparative damage ranking for various chemical processes in the hair care field.

Swelling or Porosity of Hair

Professionals who are involved in the art of styling hair define the porosity of hair as the capacity of hair%2