What Does Over-Processed Hair Color Look Like and How to Fix It

Your hair goes through a lot. Brushing, blow-drying, curling, straightening, bleaching, coloring, you name it. It is subjected to a lot of abuse all year round. The word for this abuse is – over-processing.

That’s right. If you thought the term over-processed hair only applied to bleached and chemically-treated hair, you thought wrong. Frequent, harsh handling of the hair also causes it to become over-processed which may result in hair falling out.

While it is relatively easy to spot the damage in chemically-treated hair, the same can’t be said for over-processed hair color. There’s a fine line between giving your hair dye adequate time to set and going overboard with the exposure.

What does over-processed hair color look like, and how do you fix it? Here’s everything you need to know.

How Hair Dye Works to Color Your Mane

First off, it’s important to understand what dye actually does to your hair. While changing your hair color every so often or going to the salon for a “touch up” every three weeks might seem harmless, the ingredients that make up the contents of most coloring kits are not. Here’s how they work.

Ammonia

Hair color doesn’t just rinse across your strands and stain them. To get inside the shaft, it has to penetrate the cuticle –the hair’s natural protective barrier. That’s where ammonia comes in. It lifts the cuticle to pave the way for the dye molecules to get in and deposit color. Use Ammonia-free hair colors.

Peroxide

Peroxide, commonly referred to as the “activator,” acts as a lightener to lift (read, bleach) your natural hair color before the color molecules in the dye can be deposited.

Hydrogen peroxide can be quite damaging to hair since it goes after everything in the hair shaft, not just the melanin. It even interacts with keratin – the main protein in hair fiber – leaving the hair weak and prone to hair breakage.