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Bad Hair Day
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
A hard lesson
Southern California's notoriously bad water can play havoc with your hair.
By LYN MONTAGNA
The Orange County Register
We all know Southern California has hard water. We complain about how it rusts our pipes and coats our showers with a seemingly impenetrable, crusty film.
So just imagine what it's doing to our skin and hair.
And just what does "hard water" mean, anyway?
Last week at South Coast Plaza, I got a hair chemistry lesson, courtesy of Tom Porter, CEO of Malibu Wellness. There was lots of complicated talk about oxidation and minerals and vitamins, but basically it can all be distilled down to one concept: If you're having a bad hair day (or year), it's probably because there's something in the water.
Hard water has high concentrations of calcium and magnesium, and Southern California is plagued because of where our water comes from - most of it is from the Colorado River, where it travels through a series of aqueducts on the way to our faucets, picking up minerals along the way.
And while calcium-filled water is perfectly safe to drink, Porter says, it's terrible for hair. See if you're suffering from any of these hair afflictions: Dry hair, hair that's resistant to color, highlights or color that fade quickly, darkening of hair or hair that's limp and dull. I can name about three of those that I was dealing with.
Porter was at Jose Eber Salon to test clients' water to show them just what's in it and how it's affecting their hair. He travels all around the country and Europe, testing and teaching hairstylists how to combat the effects of these things on hair. Of course, his company sells products that come to the rescue. But Porter is mostly concerned with teaching people about what's happening to their hair and how they can fix it.
Porter's fixes are built on a foundation of vitamins E and C, two powerful antioxidants. That's a buzz word that's bandied about in almost every cosmetic product out there lately, but Porter knows his stuff - he pioneered research into vitamin C's role as an antioxidant when he started his company in 1985. So an antioxidant, logically, stops oxidization, which is what's causing the fading, drying and dulling. Peroxide is an oxidant - that's the main ingredient in anything we use to highlight our hair. Minerals and chemicals in the water supply attach to our hair and compound oxidation when exposed to sun and air. So our hair's under constant assault, both by what we choose to do to it in a salon (which is why color and highlight-happy Southern California is a perfect test market for antioxidant products) and by our natural environment.
What's in water varies by city and can even change at different times of the day. When Porter dropped his testing chemicals into our samples, we saw that Santa Ana had a high chlorine content, while Lake Forest and Irvine had slightly lower levels. Chlorine is used as a disinfectant, but can wreak havoc on hair because it bleaches, which is oxidation. (Want to impress your friends? Chlorine does not turn hair green. Some pool water contains copper to combat algae. Copper turns hair green, Porter says.) Minerals cause damage, too - my Irvine shower water was full of calcium, which is probably why my highlights were getting darker so quickly, I found out later.
And the water's not getting better, say those who deal with the water supply for a living.
"California water's gotten worse over the years," says Bruce Klingler, owner of Anacon Laboratories Inc. in Riverside, a testing lab for the aerospace, automotive and electronics industries. Klingler said calcium and magnesium build up as solids on surfaces, leaving behind a residue that can't simply be washed away. He was presumably talking about airplane parts, but all I could see was a strand of hair.
Anne Marie Groome, creative director at Jose Eber, has seen lots of hard water hair. She came to the salon three weeks ago from a Vidal Sassoon salon in Chicago, where she'd been working with Porter's treatments for eight years."I'm shocked; the quality of water here is so bad," Groome said. "Hair gets overprocessed, and then you have breakage and other problems." Groome swears by Malibu Wellness products. "Once you've got it as a colorist you can't live without it," she said.Jose Eber has offered Malibu Wellness products for two months. Clients come in and ask for the "Malibu Makeover," for $35. Basically, it's a before-and-after treatment: First, there's a "normalizing" process that involves dried vitamins in a gel formula that literally strips the chemicals and minerals out of hair, so it's a clean slate for color and other treatments. "If you have buildup of this stuff on your hair and you color it, the color isn't penetrating as far into the hair as it could," Porter says. "So the color isn't as true. Add oxidation, and then it fades faster." I was skeptical about this step, so I watched Porter and a hairstylist work on client Mary Moore, 55, of Yorba Linda. "I'm from Wisconsin, and whenever I visit there, my hair's great - shiny and bouncy," she said as the treatment cooked on her head under a heated cap. "Then I come back to O.C., and it's dull and loses its shape."After five minutes, the hairstylist was pulling gobs of foamy calcium from Moore's head. When I sat down in the chair, he pulled even more calcium out of mine. The next step is to color, perm or highlight the hair like normal, then follow immediately with something that will stop the oxidation the salon has started. When Porter dropped a bit of the solution into my Irvine water, it instantly turned from a bright chlorine-indicator green to crystal clear. This is a "revitalizer" that slows oxidation and can be used weekly to perk up hair. Moore and I had similar results after the treatment - both of our highlighted heads were brighter, and we actually looked like women from those hair commercials - our hair was moving as individual strands instead of in chunks. And it was ultra-soft. You can test your own water with a regular pool-water testing kit. You can also bring a sample into Jose Eber, where they'll test it for you or send you home with a strip so you can do it yourself. Check out Malibu Wellness treatments at the Jose Eber or go to www.WellnessSalon.comto shop online and find out more about the products, which include shampoos and conditioners to thicken, promote hair growth or recondition hair, all at very reasonable prices (most value packs of shampoo and conditioner, which include a single treatment of Emergent-C Ultra Revitalizer, are under $40 - my set, for oxidized, chemically treated hair, was only $14.99).There are other good products out there based on the antioxidant concept. Pureology products use vitamins E and C, as well as the antioxidant Heliogenol, which is derived from sunflower seeds (find Pureology at beauty supply stores).
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