Corrective Relaxing using Fiberguard Affirm

Hair by Benita Blocker. Traditional Stove and Marcel iron used to achieve the shine and beauty of this hairstyle. No ceramic/ionic irons.

Corrective Relaxing is necessary when a customer gets irregular relaxer touchups. The heat from your scalp helps to process the relaxer. A client with excessive new growth will NOT process evenly. Therefore customer will have some underprocessed areas of the hair strand. Please see separate article on underprocessed hair.

Sometimes the underprocessed areas can frizz quicker than the rest of the hair and mess up the hairstyle. The underprocessed areas are more "sensitive" to the weather. So if the client is having problems with frizzing because of uneven relaxation, then the midshaft needs to be relaxed again in order to even out the underprocessed areas. Yes, there will be some overlap, but as long as a relaxer that helps preserve the tensile strength of the hair is used, corrective relaxing is safe.

I just completed a corrective relaxer service on the client above. She does have existing color highlights. She had been back and forth out of braids as well as trying to decide if she wanted to go natural. Fiberguard Normal had been her regular touch-up strength. I used the Design Essentials Restore as a pretreatment on the color-treated areas as well as through the rest of the hair ends. I applied relaxer as if was a virgin application. I started applying relaxer an inch away from the scalp and extended the relaxer over about 2 or 3 inches to make sure that I covered all potentially underprocessed areas. The processing time took about 25 minutes mainly because I did not want to overstress the hair strands as I parted gently. I manipulated the hair gently because of all the weight from the relaxer. I applied the relaxer to the roots after I finished putting relaxer on the midshaft. The roots ended up a little more texturized because parting the hair with so much relaxer on the midshaft was hard to part using gentle manipulation.

The end result was beautiful. We did a blowdry/style service to make sure the roots were straighter. In another 6 to 8 weeks, I will extend the touchup service about an extra inch out. Because the scalp heat processes quicker, I do not have to worry about overprocessing. The hair that is farther away from the scalp will process slower.

My client was happy with her corrective relaxer and final hairstyle. We were too short on time to take a picture on the relaxer day, but we did have time five days later to capture the final styling from our maintenance hair service. The picture above is after our followup shampoo/style after corrective relaxing on color- treated hair five days before. My client's hair is still strong and shiny. The Fiberguard Affirm relaxer with the Design Essentials Restore Pre-protect treatment worked well. By the way, Fiberguard Affirm does have its own Preservo protective lotion; however, I have found the bottles have short expiration dates. I did not feel that they sell enough on a regular basis.

Overall, I was happy that Fiberguard Affirm relaxer system was gentle, but effective!