your Beauty Our duty

You’ve tried countless times to encourage your clients to visit the salon for their haircolor services. After all, you are the professional who knows how to do patch tests and maintain safe methods of haircolor application. But, with a down economy, many clients have decided to color their own hair at home to save money. Now’s the time to share with them the following story about how haircolor almost killed a 19 year-old British girl due to a allergic reaction, which could potentially have been avoided with proper education.

Rachel Dowley felt a change in her features a day after applying the black hair dye to her brown hair. Within 24 hours her face had become swollen, red raw burn marks appeared on her cheeks and one of her eyes soon blackened. She immediately checked herself into a nearby hospital where doctors referred to her condition as being the worst reaction they had ever seen.

Doctors soon discovered the teen had suffered an allergic reaction to the chemical compound Paraphenylenediamine (PPD), which causes severe allergic reactions in individuals who have a rare sensitivity. Her purchase was definitely more than she bargained and hoped for. Dowley was left with swelling for nearly a month and also suffered a secondary infection that inflamed the burn marks on her face.

We immediately thought, “Did this girl conduct a patch test like the box instructed her to do so?” She sure did, BUT didn’t do it properly per box instructions, a commonly over-looked step and, for Rachel, proved to be a near fatal one. The moral of the story -- leave the color application to the pros.