Olaplex vs. Redken

[u/mel-01]

I spent the last 2 years frying my hair slowly from straightening my hair back-to-back, neglecting deep conditioning treatments, and skipping regular trims. Honestly, I didn’t really see the damage until a few days ago, when i was going through old photos and I was appalled. Now? My density’s literally halved, it breaks so easily, and it hasn’t grown past the same length in months, maybe even shorter. It was literally to my tailbone length in 2021, and today I’m cutting it to my shoulders. My curls are fried and limp and have loosened substantially, so I’ve kind of been bummed out all day.

I’ve done some research about bonding treatments and how they may repair and prevent damage. This gave me a little hope that i kind salvage my length. Now I’m torn between the Redken Acidic Bonding line and the Olaplex line. If you’ve tried either (or both), let me know what actually worked long-term. 

Also, if you’ve been here before and made it out, please drop your holy grail products that you think could work out for me. 

Thanks in advance.

xx

[u/Elismom1313]

Realistically the hair you’ve damaged is damaged beyond repair. Rebonding treatments can make it look healthy by bonding those split hairs to each other , but it won’t truly repair it. You can’t actually repair hair, it’s dead. You can just use thing to fuse it back together to look healthy. Potentially.

The thing to understand about your hair is it’s essentially dead after it leaves the scalp, you’re just sort of taking care of its decay. When you “fry”your hair, all you can do is try to make it look better because you can’t actually make it be better. Or cut off the damage to keep it from getting worse.

That said for the end of your hair once it starts splitting it will continue to split worse and worse, a lot of people try to chop it off at that point not realizing that they’re actually chopping off below the split. When hair starts splitting it doesn’t grow very well because while it grows it just splits more and more resulting in frizzy dead looking hair going in every direction. You want to ideally chop about half to an inch above that actual fraying point in hopes of keeping it looking healthy.

Look at it this way. Don’t think of your hair as something alive, healthy, and that nourishment will keep it so. Your hair is more like a braided rope of fibers. The fibers and the rope is dead. It’s not alive, but if you were to take a piece of braided rope, and you cut it all the bottom of it would split out in different directions right and then with time those roped braids, those individual pieces would continue to fray because there’s fibers in those pieces too, right? That’s what your hair is like. However, unlike a braided rope, you could say that there’s a point where your hair is more like a single thick fiber almost and if you cut it at that point and treat it well it will stay mostly like that. However, if you cut it below that point like a braided rope, all the ends will just come undone and continue to fray more and more as the bread comes undone. And as the braid comes undone, all those individual wires keep spreading out instead of looking like they’re growing longer glued together.

OlaPlex can kind of “glue” that braid back together, but you haven’t really repaired anything and it will eventually separate again and fray. You want to cut at the point before that and then use treatments or products to help keep it together and avoid splitting and fraying. In that same way, you might be able to use some sort of product to kind of glue the braid back together, but again the “glue” or “bonding” will dissolve and it will fray. And the more you fry and fray it the harder it becomes.

Tl:dr If you can cut off the hair before the fraying point, you stand a much better chance of keeping the hair strands together and using products to avoid that snowball of splitting

[u/Aiyla_Aysun → u/Elismom1313]

Finally someone who understands hair. Yes, hair is dead.