Can hair colour be intelligent?

COLOUR ALCHEMY is our latest line of revolutionary temporary hair colours that creates vibrant, shifting shades unseen in beauty until now. We wanted to create a hair colour as alive as its wearer – dynamic, moving with you as you move, always changing in response to the world around it. So that’s what we did, creating a true innovation. An intelligent beauty product. A colour movement. Here, we take a look at the technology behind COLOUR ALCHEMY to reveal how it works.

ALIVE WITH BEAUTY

Imagine your hair colour didn’t just look good, but shimmered, revealing bright iridescent colours. Imagine that the colour shifts as you go outside, as you move through the city, or the sun sets and the temperature drops. That’s exactly what happens when you wear COLOUR ALCHEMY. It’s the world’s first holographic hair colour, a dynamic product that’s always shifting – alive and changing with you and your environment.

LIQUID LIGHT

COLOUR ALCHEMY is a transformational product developed in partnership with Schwarzkopf Professional. Unlike damaging bleaches used in traditional hair products, it uses heat-responsive structural colour to create a range of shades. These colours are the result of specially formulated microprism technology that reflects different wavelengths of coloured light to the viewer.You can see examples structural colour throughout the natural world, in the feathers of peacocks, wings of some butterflies and the shells of beetles. We were inspired to replicate this effect, using materials science to create an innovative product that reveals colours unseen in beauty until now. THERMOCHROMIC INNOVATION

The microprisms in COLOUR ALCHEMY have the shape of a helix – like a coil or spring. Their structure causes only specific wavelengths of light to be reflected to the viewer. The prisms are also thermochromic, meaning they change structure when their temperature changes. And as the shape of the prism’s coil expands or shrinks, the wavelength of light that is reflected changes too, causing your hair to change colour in response to your environment. From an intense Red that shifts to become vibrant Purple, to a Petrol Black that moves through Green and Blue – there are five different colourways in the collection. Each shifting through a spectrum of shades as it heats and cools, giving the wearer an entirely new way to express themselves through beauty and revealing more about the world around us.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF DYE

COLOUR ALCHEMY is a non-permanent colour, it won’t damage your hair like traditional permanent dyes. Permanent hair dyes penetrate the hair shaft and change its structure from within – either bleaching melanin cells that give your hair its colour or adding new pigment to darken your hair. You can learn more about how damaging this can be here.

COLOUR ALCHEMY sits on top of the hair cuticle and doesn’t change the hair’s structure. When you are ready for a change, you can simply wash the product out, leaving your hair in its original condition.