Natural dye for your hair

The Scary Synthetic Story

You must have heard alot of scary tales about synthetic hair dyes. The bad news is that the more permanent the hair dye is, the more damaging your hair is. This is due to the presence of paraphenylene diamine (PPD), mixed with a developer (hydrogen peroxide). This mixture will remove the hair pigments and replace with the new colour. For dyeing a lighter colour on a darker hair, it has to be bleached first using hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst (persulphate) to accelerate the bleaching affect of hydrogen peroxide. After bleaching, the light hair dye is added.

To give you an idea about how dangerous hydrogen peroxide is; if you put a pig's liver into hydrogen peroxide solution, there will be sizzling sound from the liver and I've witnessed that laboratory experiment in high school and I was amazed backed then.

Thus frequent use of synthetic hair dyes may lead to:-

1) Hair thining
2) Hair breakage
3) Hair loss
4) May cause allergy reaction on scalp

The Alternative Natural Dye

The good news is that alternative natural dyes are harmless to your hair. In fact, it is the safest hair dyes to use. In ancient times, vegetable dyes such as henna was already commonly used as body art. Besides henna, camomile, logwood, indigo and rhubarb are also useful vegetable dyes to consider. The only disadvantage is its limited selection of colours as compared to the synthetic dyes.

Another thing to take note is about the black henna. Indigo may give a dark colour resembling black but they are not black. If it is too black to be true, it is perhaps the 'fake henna in black'. You can read more from here.

Weighing the Pros and Cons

Due to limited selection of hair dyes, it is no wonder synthetic dyes still remains available in the market. To get the best of the synthetic world, there are some restrictions on PPD usage where it must be less than 6% in the hair dye products. Some hair colour products also promise a lower PPD content (0.8% to 1.2%) and this is really good news to me. So next time, when you pop by the hair salon for a hair dye, do request for natural hair dyes or at least hair dyes with lower PPD content. I am sure this change will go a long way to keeping your crown of beauty attached.

Other related articles

1) Non-toxic Hair Facts

2) Henna from Wikipedia