It didn't work
When a treatment fails but the hair is perfectly fine.
Not everything that goes wrong is damage.
A good proportion of what walks through my door is hair in decent condition that has had three hundred pounds spent on it and nothing to show for it. It went straight for a fortnight and came back. It never went straight at all. It looked wonderful leaving the salon and looked exactly as it always had after the first wash.
That is not a disaster. It is a refund conversation and a redo, and the hair is usually strong enough to have it done properly. But almost nobody realises that, because the internet has trained everyone to assume that a failed treatment means ruined hair. So people wait six months out of fear, when they could have had the result they paid for.
Here is how to tell the difference, and what actually causes it.
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## First: is the hair fine, or is it not?
One test, thirty seconds, and it settles the question.
Take a single hair — one that has come out on the brush, not one you pull. Wet it. Hold it between the fingers of both hands and pull gently.
- It stretches a little and springs back. The internal bonds are intact. Your hair is fine. This is a failed treatment, not damaged hair, and it can almost certainly be redone.
- It stretches a long way and stays stretched, feeling soft and slightly slack. Over-processed. Different article — read [what to do in the first fortnight](/straightment-correction) instead.
- It snaps straight away with no stretch. Brittle. Also a different article.
Do it on the ends and again near the root. They are frequently in different condition. If both spring back, read on.
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## What actually makes a treatment fail
### It was under-processed
The commonest cause by a distance, and the least talked about, because "we were too gentle with your hair" is not a comfortable sentence for a salon to say.
Processing is timed to the hair, not to the clock on the wall. Coarse, resistant, low-porosity hair develops slowly and needs the time. If the product came off at the number of minutes printed on the box, on hair that needed longer, the result was always going to be half of one.
### The strength was wrong for the hair
Every system comes in strengths for a reason. A formula chosen for fine, easily-processed hair, put on thick, resistant hair, will behave impeccably and do very little. This is not incompetence so much as caution — and caution is the right instinct, it is just that the answer to a resistant head is a second, stronger appointment rather than pretending the first one worked.
### The iron never got hot enough, or never got to the root
For any smoothing treatment sealed with heat, the flat iron is not styling. It is the chemistry. Too cool, too few passes, sections too thick, or the root area skipped, and the treatment simply does not form. It will look magnificent that afternoon, because a flat iron makes anything look magnificent that afternoon.
This is also why extensions and smoothing treatments fight each other — the attachments sit exactly where the iron needs to go.
### The aftercare stripped it
Sometimes the treatment took and then came off. A heavy clarifying or anti-dandruff shampoo, a salt or sulphate-heavy cleanser used daily, swimming in chlorine within the first days, or a "deep cleanse" recommended in good faith by somebody who did not know you had just had a treatment.
I should say plainly: sulphates are not banned. You do not have to give up lather. A gentle sulphate cleanser is fine. Heavy strippers and daily washing are the problem, and there is a real difference between the two that the industry tends to flatten into "sulphate-free or else".
### It was never going to work on that hair
Some hair does not take some systems. Heavily coated hair, hair carrying product build-up or mineral deposit, hair with a lot of previous chemistry in it, hair that is simply extremely resistant. A good consultation catches this. Not every consultation is a good one.
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## How to tell a treatment has actually taken
Worth knowing before your next one, because you can check most of it yourself.
In the chair, for a smoothing treatment. After the iron passes, the section should fall and stay fallen. Glassy rather than merely dry. It should not spring or kink back at the root when released. A section that lifts straight back into its old bend has not taken, and that is visible in the mirror at the time.
In the chair, for a perm or a wave. Before neutralising, a rod is unwound part-way and the curl pushed gently towards the scalp. A properly reduced curl holds the shape of the rod — a defined S you can see. If it slides open, it needs longer. If it feels soft and slightly gummy, it has gone too far. That single check is the difference between a perm that lasts and one that has dropped by the weekend.
At home, over the following week — the real signal is drying time. Hair that took twenty minutes to blow-dry should now take eight or ten. It should lie down in damp air rather than lifting. If after the first wash your hair behaves precisely as it did before, the treatment did not take.
Say so promptly. Most salons will put right a treatment that did not process, if you tell them inside a fortnight. Almost none will after three months, and by then nobody can prove anything. This is the one situation where going straight back is the right move.
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## What I do with these
If the hair is sound and the treatment simply did not work, this is the easiest thing I do: the right chemistry, at the right strength, timed to the hair rather than the clock, with the iron doing its actual job. You get what you paid for the first time.
It is not a correction and it is not priced like one. It is a treatment.
What I will not do is put a second treatment on hair that failed because it was over-processed rather than under-processed — which is why the stretch test at the top of this page matters, and why I want to see it before I quote anything.
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## And one thing I will not do
I will not tell you who to blame, and I will not write you a report for a complaint or a claim. I have been asked many times, including by insurers, and the answer has always been the same. I have made mistakes in my own career and learned from them, which is most of how anyone learns this trade, and I am not prepared to be the person who ends someone else's over a bad day.
What you do about it is entirely your right and there are proper channels for it. My job starts and stops at your hair.
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*Zoltan Vargyai has been perming hair since 1991 and straightening it since 1999.
[See prices and book](/book) · [Straightment Correction](/straightment-correction) · [Is my hair actually damaged?](/blog/is-my-hair-damaged)*