Should you ditch your professional hair color appointments for henna? In today's episode we address a comment on YouTube where a follower talks about the benefits of switching to henna from professional salon color.

Audio Transcript - Episode 3

Welcome to Episode number three of the HairLife Podcast. I’m your host, Lina, makeup artist turned hairstylist. On this podcast we talk about hair and life. And I answer a lot of your question. So today’s question comes from a comment on YouTube regarding hair colour that is natural like henna versus professional hair colour.

I hope you enjoy the episode, let's get to it.

Today we’re picking a comment from one of my videos on YouTube and addressing it.

I have a video called Henna for your hair: Pros and Cons of Natural Haircolor.

Someone just left a comment 2 days ago saying the following:

“I have dyed my hair with Wella, L'Oreal, Garnier for the past 15 years all done by my hairdresser who is a color specialist. The chemicals in the dye messed up my hair so much. I lost more than half of my hair gradually over the last year and now when I'm washing my hair you get a plain view of my scalp. I have now turned to dying it with henna mixed with cassia and my hair feels so much softer and healthier. I used to get itchy scalp with little red bumps every time I dyed it at the salon. Now with henna it is truly a much better experience. Should have converted years ago. Never ever touching chemical-based hair dyes ever again. “

This comment is loaded and there's so many things that I want to talk about here because I think she raises or he raises a lot of really really good points.

First of all, the first thing that sticks out for me is that Garnier is not a professional haircolor.

She says that she has (I'm just going to say it’s a she because I just think it’s easier) — she’s dyed her hair with L’Oreal, Wella, Garnier for the past 15 years, all done by her hair dresser. Wella is professional, L'Oreal does have a professional brand and Garnier is not a professional brand; that’s a box color. So let’s not mish-mash them all together and say that they’re all done by a hairdresser.

I don’t know her hairdresser. Her hairdresser could be working in her basement or her hairdresser could be at a very high end salon. I really don't know this hairdresser and I can't really speak for what this person has done for her. Now there are brands that she hasn't tried. There’s Aveda. I’ve worked with Kevin Murphy; I know that it's a very good brand.

Kevin Murphy has a lot of really good natural ingredients and so does Aveda.

So the second point that she says is that “the chemicals in the dye messed up my hair so much. I lost more than half of my hair gradually over the last year and now when I’m washing my hair you got a plain view of my scalp.”

Okay so a couple things here: you don't know that the chemicals in the dye or in the hair color actually is what messed up your hair. You really don't know this.

A lot of times — ninety-nine percent of the time — when we lose our hair it is internal and it is genetic.

There is no such thing as hair dye that's going to just break off your hair.

Chemists and beauty brands are not evil. They're not out to get us. They're not out to kill us. They're not out to cause us cancer. They're not going to put ingredients in their products that are going to kill us because that's really bad for their shareholders. That’s not good business practice. And that’s just going to get them a bad reputation.

Why would they want to do that? Why would L'Oreal try to purposely put something in the haircolor that is bad for you?

Also, chemists are working all the time and these companies are pumping tons of money into their research, the latest scientific research, to make sure that we get the best products that are going to give us the the best hair.

So there's no such thing as haircare that’s bad for you.

So when we lose our hair it is internal. It is genetic. It is highly genetic. I bet you that if I were to look at this person's genetic history — look at their mother's side, their father’s side, look at their uncle's, look at their family tree — I bet you that there is hair thinning and hair loss.

There's also stress and there is diet. I see a lot of vegans, for example, who lose their hair.

It’s like a snowball effect. If you start out with just stress like say you have a stressful time in your life. That increases your cortisol levels. It messes up with your hormones, and now your hormones are out of balance, and your hormones can cause hair loss. Or the imbalance of your hormones can cause hair loss, impacted with the genetic predisposition to losing your hair — that could really wreak havoc. It’s just a storm waiting to happen and that's what can cause it.

The dye or the hair color (I don't call it dye. Professionally we say hair color.) The hair color could have been the, I want to say, the quote on quote, the last straw but it is not the cause.

So now she's saying that she's been using henna with cassia. I actually have never used cassia so I don't really know what that is or what it does. My video is purely about henna because I've used it myself, and I just talk about the pros and cons.

She says that she used to get an itchy scalp with little red bumps every time she dyed it at the salon. That sounds like an allergic reaction. It sounds like whatever ingredients are in the hair colour did not work for her scalp.

So if henna works for you that's great. I'm not saying that henna is bad. I’m not saying you should never use it. I'm not saying that hair colour is bad. I'm not saying that hair colour is good. Everyone is different and if it works for you then that is wonderful. I'm not here to preach any particular brand I'm not here to preach anything.

I’m just here to educate you and tell you the difference because I have been to hair school. I'm a professional hair stylist and I'm also a consumer. So I also go to the salon and I get my hair colour done and my hair cut and I've also used henna and I stopped using henna for certain reasons.

So every time I tell you guys about something that I speak about from personal experience it's not just anecdotal. I’m also talking about the evidence that I've seen from my clients in the salon and I’ve talked to my colleagues as well. My professional colleagues. And they give me their input and advice. So if you have any questions you want to come to someone like me who is behind the chair who's also in the chair a lot of the time.

Hair is a lot of science and it's a lot of chemistry.

To bring it back to allergies and allergic reaction: this is why we're taught to do a strand test. From what I see in her comment it sounds like she has you know some type of an allergy, a sensitivity that is just not agreeing with this particular hair colour. She says that she's used Wella and L’Oreal and Garnier.

So a brand like Kevin Murphy for example has honey in it and it has a lot of really really common ingredients that clients love. So even clients, when I was working in a Kevin Murphy Salon, the clients that used to have allergic reactions never reacted to the Kevin Murphy line. So that's one line that she hasn't used. Maybe if she were to use it she would love it.

There’s also Aveda. Some people say that they are allergic to Aveda. Maybe because it has too many essential oils. Sometimes we're allergic to the essential oils. Not everything that’s natural is good. And I do want to bring up another point about henna, and I will make a full episode about this and go in depth into the pros and cons of henna.

Henna, just because it's natural doesn't mean that it's good. If you're going to buy a henna that has different colours besides red, that is not real henna. So if you see blonde henna, there is no such thing. It is a chemical. A man-made chemical let’s say because everything is a chemical anyway. I don’t like using the word “chemical”. It’s not a bad thing. Chemicals are not bad.

The way that the henna plant is harvested brings up a huge question mark, because we don't know what goes into the plant. A lot of times these plants are grown with a lot of pesticides and there are heavy metals in the soil and that soil gets absorbed by the plant and then the plant ends up carrying those heavy metals and then you put those heavy metals in your hair.

That can burn your hair if you were to get a chemical treatment — so if you were going to, say, get maybe a keratin treatment or you're going to get your hair lightened. So those are metallic salts that are going to sit on your hair that could potentially cause third-degree burns if you are going to get your hair chemically colored or lightened.

We really don't know how henna works because there's not enough scientific research behind it. There’s no FDA (or Health Canada) approval for henna. There's no governing body that tells us how henna is made or what’s in it or the chemical compounds. Some henna is fake. Some henna is real. They come from different countries in the world so every country kind of harvests the plant in a different way.

You know, if it works for you then that's wonderful. If it works for you to stick then stick to the brand that you are using. Don't use different brands. Again, like I said, a lot of cosmetics companies tout it as a natural alternative to hair color.

And I just don't understand why we have to go that route because hair color is just as good and it doesn't damage the hair.

In any case it sounds like this person really didn't trust her hair stylist and she went and wanted something that was an alternative, kind of like how we go to an alternative medicine doctor or Chinese medicine doctor instead of going to our Western doctor because we don't trust our doctors. So it really breaks my heart when I hear stories like this because the more education we have about our beauty, about our hair, about our skin, we make better educated decisions.

I would also love to know whether this person got their hair back to the way that it was before. And I wonder if anything else had changed in her life that could cause this because she says that she should have used henna from before, from the very beginning, and henna has made her hair so much softer and healthier.

And I wonder what that means. Okay, maybe the hair is softer. I don't know how that works because henna actually dries out the hair. Henna is very very strong. It feels like a very, like it almost keratinizes the hair. It makes it very dry so I don't know how it makes the hair softer. Maybe some particular brand of henna that she uses.

I also want to know whether she stopped losing hair and she mentions that she could see her scalp when she was using hair dye, so I wonder if now you can’t see her scalp.

I hope that her hair is growing back. I wonder if she mixes anything in with the henna besides cassia. A lot of people will add turmeric or coffee or tea because they think it’s going to give it more of a vibrant colour.

I do wonder if she has less stress in her life.

Maybe she changed her diet. Maybe she moved. There are so many different factors.

Correlation is not causation. Just because something correlates with something else does not mean that it caused it.

I'd like to know if this person got her hair back to health and shine and if there have been any other factors involved. There’s also postpartum. Maybe if this person is a female, maybe she just had kids, maybe her kids had grown up and moved. So many other lifestyle factors that go into hair. Hair loss, skin, weight. Like all of it.

Okay so enough philosophy for today. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening.