How To Get Long - Lasting Volume

The primary challenge in creating volume is creating a space, or air pocket, between the hair and the scalp. The most common areas where volume is desired are:

R - Root lift (increases height and length of head)
B - Bang lift (keeps hair up and off face)
S - Side volume (hair doesn't cling to scalp)
E - End volume (hair looks free flowing or shaped without stringiness)

Illustrated volume zones

Techniques to Pump It Up

Wet Setting -- Reshaping the Hair Strand

Creating Frictional Interactions

Bond Hair Strands in Place

Wet Setting -- Reshaping the Hair Strand

The process most people use to reshape the hair strand is wet setting to increase curvature or set a shape in your hair. The basic process is to wet the hair by either shampooing or applying a wet styler. Shampooing works best because the surfactants help the water penetrate the hair shaft really well.Once the hair is wet it is redried into shape either by air drying on rollers or heat drying with a blowdryer on a round brush.

Why does this work?

Your hair has three primary bonds responsible for its shape:

Salt bonds - temporary and easy to rearrange because they are water dependent. When you wet your hair, the water inserts itself between the salt bonds - breaking them. When you dry out the water, the salt bonds reform in whatever shape the hair is arranged in. The effect is temporary - as soon as the hair is wet, the bonds will break and go back to their original configuration.

Disulphide bonds - permanent and can only be changed through chemical processing (e.g. perming, relaxing, etc.)

Hydrogen bonds - temporary and easy to rearrange because they are water dependent. Function the same way as salt bonds.

Chemical bonds within the hair maintain its shape

How can styling products help?

Wet stylers like mousse and gel help the reshaping process in two ways:

1) they help rewet the hair so that there is water available to loosen up the hydrogen bonds.

2) their styling polymers help hold the hair strands together in place until the strand is completely dry and the set is complete.

What about heat styling?

Curling irons work on the same principle - even on dry hair. The water embedded in the hydrogen and salt bonds mobilizes from the action of heat - allowing the bonds to be reshaped.

Watch out for Humidity Attack!

Water in the air as humidity can also penetrate your hair shaft and loosen up those hydrogen bonds you worked so hard to create!

Before humidity

After humidity

Dianna's Science Advice:
The best way to prevent "humidity attack" is to use hairspray on your finished hairstyle. The hold polymers in hairspray are the most humidity resistant polymers around. That's because hairspray polymers are not soluble in water alone- the water must be mixed with surfactants, like shampoo, to weaken hairspray bonds.

Creating Frictional Interactions

Temporarily increasing hair friction also helps increase volume and fullness. There are four ways to temporarily increase friction:

Cleaning your hair - your hair's natural oils or sebum can build up over time, making your hair more slippery, reducing friction and making hair go limp.

Dianna's Science Advice:
Cleaning these oils off with a volume- building shampoo will restore your hair's natural friction and give you the best start at creating long-lasting volume.

Use foundation stylers like mousse and gel - styling gels and mousses actually temporarily increase friction during styling to help you achieve and keep your style. They go into your hair as a smooth film but as the film partially dries they go through a tacky or sticky phase. This helps you hold your hair into shape while you finish drying your hair. Once the film is completely dry, it is smooth once again.

Color treating - another way to increase friction is to color treat your hair. Research has shown that bleaching can increase surface friction by as much as 1/3. Color treating your hair changes the chemistry of your cuticle - the important outer layer of the hair shaft. This change in chemistry makes the hair less slippery, increasing friction and making your hair feel and look fuller. Be careful - to much bleaching or excessive coloring can make your hair so rough that it becomes hard to detangle and more susceptible to damage.

Teasing or backcombing - teasing or combing your hair backwards from tip to root will rough up the cuticle, drastically increasing friction. This temporarily creates loads of volume but is very dangerous to your hair shaft over time. Teasing causes the cuticle layers to roll and peel up.

Damaged cuticle from teasing

Danilo's Style Advice:
You might be willing to tease your hair once in a while for your wedding or prom, but repeated teasing will cause serious hair damage. One alternative to teasing is to use hairspray on the roots of dry hair before styling to give some of the same benefits of increased friction as teasing without damaging the hair cuticle.

Danilo styling hair

Volume created via friction alone can collapse over time as wind, head-shaking or other forms of disruption move around your hair. It is a house of cards that can be sealed into place with the right styling products.

Bonding Hair Strands in Place for Long-Lasting Volume

Once you have created your style through reshaping strands or creating a network of strands, you need to hold it in place in order to have long-lasting volume. Volume created via wet styling and friction are especially vulnerable to humidity attack and disruption from wind, head shaking, etc. But you can keep your volume with the help of styling products. Styling products help keep long-lasting volume by creating reinforcing bonds between hair shafts at critical locations to your style. These bonds come in two types:¹⁰

Seam welds - bonds created that hold two hair shafts together in side-by- side alignment; by holding these hairs together you increase the stiffness and body of the hair shaft - helping it hold the hair away from the scalp on its own

Spot welds - found where hairs cross each other to create a support structure; the styling polymer glues the shafts together at this critical structural point

All styling products create both kinds of welds. However, mousse, gel and waxes are preferred for creating seam welds. This is because they are applied in larger quantities and typically rubbed in hand before the finished style is created. Hairspray is preferred for creating spot welds because it is applied through the air in tiny droplets to a finished style and thus can act on critical hair cross-over points.