"Most of us in Trinidad and To­ba­go have dark hair and be­cause of this we may need to get our hair bleached to an ex­tent in or­der to achieve brighter colours."

Safiya Damani

Se­nior Press Pass Cor­re­spon­dent

As per­sons liv­ing in a mod­ern so­ci­ety, we are al­ways look­ing for ways to stand out or show our in­di­vid­u­al­i­ty. One way in which we show this is through our hair. For in­stance, some per­sons may de­cide to sport an afro, dread­locks or maybe a Mo­hawk as a sign of self ex­pres­sion. Sim­i­lar­ly, oth­ers al­so ex­press them­selves by colour­ing their hair. As hu­mans, we are nev­er sat­is­fied; there­fore if there is some­thing af­ford­able and safe that we can do to en­hance our ap­pear­ance, we will most like­ly do it. Hair colour­ing is one of these things.

What is colour?

Colour can be de­fined as an op­ti­cal il­lu­sion a re­flec­tion of light falling on­to the ob­ject in view. In our hair, the out­er lay­er or the cu­ti­cle is trans­par­ent and it is the colour pig­ments in the cor­tex or in­ner lay­er which shine through the cu­ti­cle and give us the colour that we see on our hair. De­spite this, in some African-Caribbean hair types, there is al­so pig­ment dis­trib­uted in the cu­ti­cle. Re­search sug­gests that African-Caribbean hair is more re­sis­tant to the pen­e­tra­tion of chem­i­cals. How­ev­er, this is on­ly true for hair in its vir­gin state. Our nat­ur­al hair is com­posed of vary­ing pro­por­tions of black, brown, red and yel­low pig­ments. Black and brown hair, which most of us have in Trinidad and To­ba­go, con­tains a lot of pig­ment, most­ly the very dark pig­ment which is known as eu­me­lanin. On the oth­er hand, blonde hair con­tains very lit­tle pig­ment, pre­dom­i­nant­ly the yel­low-red pig­ment known as pheome­lanin. White hair how­ev­er, has very lit­tle or no melanin. We usu­al­ly de­vel­op this colour hair as we age. Al­bi­nos on the oth­er hand are born with lit­tle to no melanin in their hair, skin and eyes.

How is colour made up?

When colour­ing the hair, shades of colours are used in a sim­i­lar way to paints. They can ei­ther be used sep­a­rate­ly or mixed to­geth­er to achieve dif­fer­ent colours. There are four main sets of colours; pri­ma­ry, sec­ondary, ter­tiary and com­ple­men­tary. The pri­ma­ry colours are red, blue and green. These colours com­bine to form sec­ondary colours. Sec­ondary colours and pri­ma­ry colours com­bine to form ter­tiary colours. Some ex­am­ples of these ter­tiary colours are cop­per red, gold and ma­hogany. Com­ple­men­tary colours how­ev­er, are made up of pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary colours that are op­po­site each oth­er on the colour wheel. They can be used to neu­tralise un­want­ed hair colour and, when mixed to­geth­er, cre­ate a shade of brown. 'Neu­tralise' in this case sim­ply refers to a way of get­ting rid of un­want­ed colour which emerged dur­ing the tint­ing process.

Con­sul­ta­tion and analy­sis

To sim­pli­fy the colour­ing process, man­u­fac­tur­ers pro­duce shade charts us­ing syn­thet­ic hair swatch­es in or­der to show their colour range. It is im­por­tant that you are pro­vid­ed with one of these charts when choos­ing a colour to put in your hair at the hair sa­lon. These charts should be viewed in nat­ur­al light as the light in the sa­lon may cause the colours on the colour chart to ap­pear dark­er or lighter than they re­al­ly are. Once you do this, you will not be sur­prised when you step out in­to the sun­light and see that you got your hair done in per­haps a bright or­ange or red colour!

Most of us in the Trinidad and To­ba­go have dark hair and be­cause of this we may need to get our hair bleached to an ex­tent in or­der to achieve brighter colours. The shade chart can al­so be use­ful here as it can in­di­cate to you the colour that is achiev­able with and with­out pre-light­en­ing. How­ev­er it is nec­es­sary to bear in mind that hy­dro­gen per­ox­ide, a chem­i­cal used to strip the hair of its colour, can al­so strip the hair of its mois­ture. The num­ber of lifts re­quired to light­en your hair can leave it ex­treme­ly dry and brit­tle and there­fore mak­ing it more dif­fi­cult to re­tain length.

This was just an in­tro­duc­tion to hair colour­ing. The ef­fects of hair colour­ing and its prop­er treat­ment will be dis­cussed lat­er on in the se­ries. Un­til then, take in­to con­sid­er­a­tion the ba­sic things pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned which you should know be­fore mak­ing the de­ci­sion to colour your hair.

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