Gray Hair Treatment

The main methods of non-surgical hair replacement today involve the use of hair systems and hair loss concealers. Various types of hair systems such as full wigs, hairpieces, hair extensions, toupees and weaves can look extremely authentic and have been used for ages to cover bald spots and typically with good rates of success. However, their main weaknesses are high maintenance costs and, in a number of situations, the discomfort of wearing them. Hair loss concealers and hair thickeners on the other hand have been around for a shorter period of time and have often been looked down upon for being incapable of withstanding adverse external conditions and for appearing unnatural. This seems to be no longer true as many of them have greatly improved recently, both in terms of their authentic appearance and their resistance.

There are three existing types of hair loss concealers: those that simply paint your scalp to match your hair colour, then there are hair thickeners that thicken your hair by coating and penetrating the hair and trapping moisture and volume-building proteins inside the hair shaft and, lastly, there are concealers that apply microfibers that cling to your hair like branches to the trunk of a tree, increasing the hair density. Some products combine two of the aforementioned approaches and paint your scalp and thicken your hair at the same time. All of these products come in various forms, such as a powder, cream or a spray. Hair loss concealers do not contain any ingredients that would help treat and improve hair loss condition but some of them allow you to continue with a topical hair loss treatment such as minoxidil.

Microfiber-based hair loss concealers can be usually applied in as little as 30 seconds versus a minimum of five minutes needed for hair thickeners. However, microfibers are less water-resistant and it is quite difficult to apply them precisely and thus they are not very good for creating an authentic-looking frontal hairline. Their main strength is that they are unrecognisable in your hair, even with a very close inspection. Hair thickeners, especially those that also colour your scalp, are extremely water-resistant and excellent for creating fine frontal hairlines but they take longer to apply. They cover your scalp with a layer of colouring substance, which makes it impossible to apply any topical hair loss treatment. Their main weakness in comparison to microfibers is that in direct sunlight it can become visible to the sharp eye that the scalp has been painted.

The common weakness of all chemical substances used for concealing hair loss is the limited choice and authenticity of available shades. Some hair loss sufferers use a combination of two different products simultaneously to overcome the weaknesses of individual products and to achieve the most authentic shade, texture and appearance. Most often a combination of a hair thickener and a micro fibrous concealer is used. The results of such combinations are typically excellent. If you decide to try any such combinations, make sure that you apply the scalp-painting, hair loss thickener first and then use the microfibers to mask the remaining imperfections. There are many products in all three categories of hair loss concealers and you may need to test several of them in order to identify those that best match you hair colour and style of application.

Grey hair can be stubborn and difficult to cover. If you try to colour it, it sometimes turns a smoky unnatural colour and in other cases it simply does not cover your grey at all. So, how do you get 100% grey hair coverage each and every time you colour your hair?

The key seems to lie in choosing the right colour for your hair type. There are several types of hair dyes including temporary (washes out with a single shampoo), semi-permanent (washes out gradually over about four weeks) and permanent hair colours (will not wash out at all). The main difference of each type of hair dye is the strength of the developer used. Colour developer is the ingredient that is responsible for pushing the colour beneath your cuticle layer so that it cannot be easily washed out.

In grey hair, this cuticle layer is extremely compact and difficult to open making it hard for the colour to penetrate inside the hair strand. If you do not succeed at doing this, the colour will wash out very easily and fade over the next few shampoos. To make sure that you get the pigment into the hair strand, use a permanent colour with at least 20 volume hydrogen peroxide as the developer.

Difference in hair colour is given by the amount of pigment that is in the hair strands. Blond hair has the least amount of pigment, then there is red followed by brown and black. Grey hair is lacking pigment altogether. In order to get your colour back into grey hair, you need to go through all of the stages depending on what colour you want to achieve. If you want blond hair, the process is quite simple. All you need to do is use a golden colour. If you want brown hair, on the other hand, you will need to choose a colour with a red or warm base so that you can get a natural looking brown. If you use a green or ash base, you will end up with a greenish or smoky cast.

When covering grey, you should also leave the colour on for the maximum amount of time allowed by the instructions. Doing so will give the colour sufficient time to deposit in the stubborn and coarse grey strands. The only time that you can save on time is if your hair is 30% grey or less. In those cases, the grey hair will absorb enough colour to make it look like you have natural highlights and you can avoid the rest of your naturally pigmented hair going too dark. So, if you have had poor results when it comes to covering your grey, try to follow these tips to get complete coverage and you will have beautiful results every time.