Along with the shampoo and cut, the permanent wave has become a standard part of hair care for women. Depending on how it is used, a permanent can give hair just the boost it needs to look buoyant, or it can create lasting waves and curls where none existed before. But despite the permanents? widespread use.
We are well into the year and now that the hangovers and questionable party hair are just a blurry memory, there is a subject that I would like to address that had very little column space last year.By now I?m sure you already know that relaxers are done with either lye (sodium hydroxide) or no lye (calcium hydroxide or guanidine hydroxide) and even though many people use the term ?perm? when we mean relaxers, they are very different processes. Curly perms are done using a chemical called ammonium thioglycolate often shortened to thio. Thio is gentler on hair than lye or no lye relaxers.
Unlike permanent waving Caucasian or Asian hair, the process of waving Afro textured hair is twofold. First the thio based chemical is applied to remove the natural curl then rinsed off.
A basic solution of Kopcolate-A is applied to the hair. The excess ammonia present in the solution helps the hair swell so that the reagents can work their way through each strand of hair, and also deprotonates the thioglycolate molecule, enabling it to break open disulfide bridges. At this point, the hair is wrapped around a curling rod and sprinkled with an oxidizing solution containing hydrogen peroxide. The disulfide bonds are reformed and the hair comes off the rod with a curl.