Does hair dye weaken and damage your hair?

Basically, our experiment was we dyed hair with 3 different hair dyes on the same person’s hair. We separated the hair into 3 parts, and we dyed each part with a different hair dye, the brands we used were: X, Y, and Z. Before we dyed the hair, we checked it under the microscope and checked its physical characteristics to check for breaks and other things. As we were dying the hair we checked for changes, and we saw changes in color. Later, after we shampooed the hair, we looked under the microscope and saw some changes. In brand X we saw no change in structure, there were no other changes. In brand Y, we saw that there were less than 10 breaks, and a few split ends. When we checked the brand Z dyed hair, we saw that there were a few breaks, less than five. There weren’t complete changes in appearance and structure, but there were some minor changes. As for our original question: does hair dye weaken and damage your hair? The answer is the following, yes it does in some ways and when you use some brands, in some brands you see changes in appearance and you see breaks, but in others the hair remains the same. We infer that if we dye these strands of hair over again, the hair would be damaged. We think that the more times you dye your hair, the more chemicals, thus the more damage. Our hypothesis was partially correct, because brand X wasn’t damaging to the hair, but brand Y and brand Z were slightly damaging. In our hypothesis, we said that hair dye would be damaging to the hair, but it was both damaging and not damaging in some cases, so we were partially right. Possible reasons why brand X was not damaging to hair and the others were, is that they could have different ingredients which damage or don’t damage the hair. This experiment is useful to many people, because many people dye their hair either to be hip, cover their grey hairs, or to go for a new style. So, people want to use the safest dye for their hair, so their hair doesn’t get burned or damaged, and we recommend for you to use brand X, because it showed the least damage. The controlled variable in this experiment was the hair, the hair all came from the same person, it was brown wavy hair. Most probably the results would’ve been different if we used different types of hair, but because we used the same type of hair we know that our results are right. The uncontrolled variables were the hair dyes. That was the whole basis of our experiment, and we couldn’t of done this experiment without it. What we tried to achieve in this experiment was which hair dye was the safest to use. What could’ve been done to improve the project, was to use more brands of hair dye to explore this more, also to dye the piece of hair over and over again to see how long to make it really damaged. We really enjoyed doing this project, because there was a very important reason to do it. In the future, we would like to examine the components of hair dyes and see what effect they have on hair separately, and use other substances and see what effect they have on hair. We hoped you enjoyed our project as much as we did !
Samar Al Ansari
Grade 8