Acids for Hair? Yep, Your Beloved Skincare Ingredients Work There Too

Acid is great for your hair. Skincare aficionados associate alpha-hydroxy acids with exfoliation, but they do a slightly different job when it comes to your strands. Ingredients like citric acid help repair your hair cuticles — or the outside layers of your hair — to seal in moisture and balance your hair’s delicate pH. 

In fact, the best-in-class system to repair intensely damaged hair has “acidic” right in the name. Redken’s Acidic Bonding Concentrate Bonding Care repair line, available at Ulta and your local Redken salon, uses citric acid to penetrate damaged hair cuticles with a patent-pending Bonding Care Complex to fortify the molecular bonds in your strands. The four-step system is made up of the Intensive Treatment (which primes your hair), a sulfate-free bonding shampoo, a slightly acidic conditioner, and a Leave-in Treatment to lock in moisture and protect hair. 

Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of incorporating acidic products into your hair regimen.

Healthy Hair Should Be Slightly Acidic 

Balancing the pH levels of your hair is imperative to maintaining its health. The pH scale ranges from one to 14 (with one to seven being acidic, and seven to 14 being alkaline), and an ideal range for healthy hair is between four-and-a-half and five-and-a-half. Color treatments, heat tools, shampoo, and even the water from your shower can push your hair to the alkaline side of the scale, making it more vulnerable to damage. Each product in Redken’s Acidic Bonding Concentrate system works to balance your hair’s pH with citric acid. Couple that with the intense conditioning power of the formula and your hair has never felt healthier.

Acidic Bonding Concentrate Prevents Breakage

One of the primary benefits of using an acidic hair care formula pertains to your strands’ first line of defense: the hair cuticle, or the outer layer of your hair strand. When your hair’s pH becomes more alkaline, your cuticles start to fray, exposing the inner layers of your strands to damaging elements and causing split ends, breakage, frizz, and color loss from recent coloring services. Redken’s Acidic Bonding Concentrate leaves hair 14x smoother, 2x stronger, and 90% more conditioned.*

Acids Are Good for Your Scalp

This may seem counterintuitive, but acid-infused hair products can prevent your scalp from becoming dehydrated. Alkaline hair is more prone to dandruff and dryness due to fluctuations in your scalp’s microbiome, throwing healthy bacteria and oils out of balance. Redken's Acidic Bonding Concentrate line helps restore your hair to a healthy pH range after every wash, helping prevent these common problems. After just one application, users reported that their hair felt healthier, and the effects multiplied with continued usage.

Brighten up your haircare routine with citric acid, thanks to Redken Acidic Bonding Concentrate.

_{* When used as a system of the Acidic Bonding Concentrate Intensive Treatment, Shampoo, Conditioner and Leave-In vs. Non-conditioning shampoo}