The Down Perm

A perm that makes hair lie flat

A down perm is a chemical service applied only to the sides and the nape, to stop short hair standing out horizontally from the head. Nothing is wound on anything. The hair is soaked in a thick cream reducer, pressed flat against the skull under papers, held there while it processes, and then fixed in that position. What comes off the head afterwards is hair that lies down and stays lying down until it grows.

It is worth stopping on how odd that is here. Every other page in this library puts a shape into hair that did not have one. This is the same chemistry aimed at removing one the hair already had: the sulphur bonds are opened, the fibre is held in a new position, the bonds are closed again — and the new position happens to be flat.

A perm is not a machine for making curls. It is a machine for making hair keep a shape. This one keeps the flattest shape there is.

In Korea it is an ordinary line on an ordinary price list, booked as routinely as a haircut. In Britain it is nearly impossible to find. A handful of Korean-run salons in London do it properly and almost nobody else offers it at all, which is why clients arrive here having read about it and assuming it is exotic. It is not exotic. It is a service the British trade never adopted, on hair it rarely sees enough of to have built a habit around.

The two-block cut, and hair that will not lie down

Coarse hair has a rigid cuticle and strong internal structure, and it grows out of the scalp at close to a right angle. At an inch or two long it has nothing like enough weight for gravity to pull it down, so it simply stands out sideways. Wax and a blow-dryer will hold it for a morning, and heavy product on the sides reads as greasy long before it reads as neat.

For decades the answer to that was to remove the hair: the clipper fade takes the sides down to a length too short to stick out. What changed in Korea in the late 2000s and early 2010s was the arrival of the two-block cut — a longer, textured canopy on top, disconnected from much shorter sides and back, but crucially not taken to the skin. The sides keep an inch or two of length, because the shape depends on them being soft rather than shaved. And an inch or two of coarse hair is exactly the length that will not lie down.

So Seoul stylists built a service to make it lie down, and the down perm arrived as the compulsory companion to the haircut. What it produces is a silhouette rather than a texture: a head that is narrower at the sides, which makes the volume on top read as taller and the face as slimmer. Paired with lift at the crown — see the root perm — it is the whole architecture of the modern Korean men’s head, and it is why so many of the photographs clients bring me cannot be reproduced with a haircut alone.

Standard perm chemistry, thickened, at modest strength

This gets described wrongly almost everywhere, including in places that ought to know better, so it is worth settling plainly.

A down perm cream is standard thio-family perm chemistry at modest strength. It is not a highly alkaline straightening cream, and it is not a relaxer.

The reducing agent is from the same family as any cold wave lotion — thioglycolate, or one of its gentler relatives — and it works the same way: it opens disulphide bonds, the hair is held in a new position, and an oxidising neutraliser closes the bonds again in that position. The only genuinely unusual things about the product are its viscosity and its strength. It is made thick, because it has to sit on a vertical surface above somebody’s ear for a quarter of an hour without running into their eyes; and it is kept at moderate strength, because it is being applied directly against skin at the most vulnerable part of the hair.

The confusion with straightening is understandable and it is worth naming, because it matters more than a point of vocabulary. A hydroxide relaxer works by lanthionisation: one sulphur of the pair is permanently removed, the bond can never be re-formed, and the change cannot be undone or built on. Thio chemistry breaks a bond that can be closed again. They are different reactions, and they must never meet on the same length of hair in either direction — which is why calling a down perm a straightener is not pedantry. Someone who believes he has had a relaxer on his sides will be told no by any competent stylist for the rest of that hair’s life. See perm versus relaxer.

There are no rods, so there is no thermal step and no machine. It is a cold service throughout, which makes it simple to perform and, as the rest of this page explains, easy to overdo.

An hour, and one step that decides it

1. The cut, first. Sides left at roughly one to two inches. Never shorter. The haircut defines where the treated zone stops and the untreated canopy begins, and that line cannot be drawn on an intention.
2. Application. The thick cream is painted onto the trouble zones only — temples, sideburns, above the ears, the nape. Nothing goes near the canopy, and the boundary is drawn deliberately rather than allowed to blur.
3. The plastering. Heavy setting papers are laid over the cream-soaked hair and pressed flush to the scalp. The hair is held against the skin rather than around a former. This is what makes it a down perm rather than a very loose perm.
4. Processing, watched. Ten to fifteen minutes, checked by eye throughout, not left under a clock. This is the step where the service is won or lost, and the reason is in the next section.
5. Rinse and neutralise. A thorough scrub — thick cream against a scalp does not leave willingly — then the oxidiser to close the bonds in their new position, then a final rinse.

An hour, give or take, including the haircut, with nothing to sit under. The client feels a mild tingle at most; real burning means the cream comes off at once, because that is skin being irritated and not the treatment working.

Afterwards there is essentially no styling to do, which is the whole point of the service. Aim the dryer down the sides rather than at them, and do not scrub the sides with a towel. And give it seventy-two hours before you press anything into it: neutralising reforms the bonds but does not finish the job on the spot, oxidation carries on in air and the fibre keeps hardening for about three days, and in that window what you press into the hair tends to stay. No tight caps, no hard brushing, and go gently with heat. For washing, follow the instruction that came with the product used.

Four to six weeks, and the arithmetic behind it

The chemical change is permanent on the hair it touched. That hair will lie flat until it is cut off. What ends the effect is not the perm relaxing but hair growing.

Hair grows about half an inch a month, a little over a centimetre. The new hair arriving out of the scalp has never met a reducing agent, and it stands out exactly as the old hair did. Within four to six weeks there is enough of it at the root to push the treated length outwards, and the narrow silhouette is gone even though every strand that was treated is still perfectly flat.

Which produces the most useful thing to understand about this service: it is not on a perm schedule at all. It is on a haircut schedule.

A down perm is repeated when the hair is cut, roughly monthly — not every six months like a perm. It syncs to the barber, not to the calendar a perm usually lives on.

In Korea the two are simply booked together. It also means the treated hair never accumulates: most of what was flattened last month has been cut off this month, which matters for the section below.

Virgin hair, coarse hair, and the refusal that clients argue with

The unusual thing about this service, chemically, is what it is applied to. Men are cut frequently and the sides are cut shortest, so the inch of hair being treated is almost always virgin: no tint, no bleach, no previous perm, no history at all. Very little else in this library works on hair that clean, and it removes most of the variables that make a chemical service unpredictable.

Best for coarse, thick hair whose sides refuse to lie flat; for anyone growing out a fade through the puffy stage; and for a two-block cut, which barely works without it. It works with care on medium hair, with a milder cream and a shorter watch, because flattening hair that was only half-standing tips easily into looking painted on.

Bleached hair: usually no — and usually is doing real work in that sentence. Bleaching oxidises cystine into cysteic acid, and a neutraliser needs two sulphur atoms it can no longer find, so most bleached or highlighted hair takes the change badly while the hair pays for it. On this service it matters more than usual, because the cream sits against the root line where the fibre is newest and softest. Highlights count. Foils count. That is the default and the default is no. It is a judgement made on the hair in front of me — how much lightener, how long ago, how much has grown out, what condition the rest is in — and occasionally, in the right hands and at the right strength, it is possible. Assume no, and come and let me look rather than deciding from a page. See bleach damage. Hydroxide-relaxed hair is never treated, in either direction.

Minimum age is 16, with a parent. Pregnancy: I would postpone, since this means a structural chemical held directly against the scalp for a quarter of an hour, and hormonal change alters how hair takes any chemistry.

How it fails, and why the drugstore kit is the danger

There is one characteristic failure and it is worth describing precisely, because it is the reason the ten to fifteen minutes are watched rather than timed.

If the cream is too strong, or is left on too long, the hair is over-processed at the exact point where it leaves the skin. That is the softest, newest and least protected part of the fibre, and it has the entire weight of the strand hanging off it. Nothing looks wrong at the basin. It shows up a day or two later, when the client brushes the side of his head or sleeps on it, and the hair parts under low load and comes away cleanly at the scalp. The result is patchy, localised baldness above the ears, and it grows back at half an inch a month like everything else.

That is the root snap, and it is not mysterious. It is the predictable consequence of leaving a reducing agent on the root line past the point the fibre could take, and the whole of the professional technique here is a defence against it: a moderate cream, papers rather than tension, eyes on the hair rather than a timer, and an immediate rinse at the first sign of softening.

The other failure is cosmetic rather than structural, and it is the boundary. Where the flattened zone meets the untreated canopy there is a line, and if the cut and the application do not agree about where that line is, it shows as a visible step. That is a matter of drawing the zone onto a finished haircut rather than onto an intention, which is the sequencing rule that governs this whole family — the reasoning is on the Korean perm, along with what happens when two or three of these services are put on one head in an afternoon. If you want the sides done and a wind on top, that combined work is priced at cold waving for men.

Questions