Beauty Hair You CAN Use Olaplex at Home — and It Works Miracles on Damaged Hair Repair your hair like a pro. By Victoria Moorhouse Victoria Moorhouse Instagram Website Victoria Moorhouse is a writer, editor, and consultant based in Brooklyn, New York who focuses on beauty, fitness, and health. Victoria was previously the Senior Beauty Editor at InStyle.com and a Senior Editor at POPSUGAR. Her work can also be found in notable publications such as Shape.com, The Zoe Report, Forbes.com, and Well+Good. She graduated from The College of New Jersey with a Bachelor's Degree in Journalism and Professional Writing. InStyle's editorial guidelines Updated on May 9, 2022 @ 09:00AM Pin Share Tweet Email Photo: Getty Images You can get your hands on Olaplex without stealing it from your colorist's stash. The answer is Olaplex 3 — the at-home version of the in-salon hair treatment designed to prevent and repair damage that comes along with dyeing or bleaching. What Does Olaplex 3 Do? It's a pretty similar process to how the original Olaplex (the one you can only get in a salon) works, so let's start with a little refresher. The professional-only products (Olaplex 1 and 2) use a technology that repairs broken disulfide bonds. These bonds are responsible for holding together the keratin fibers that make up your hair, and they're often broken during a coloring process. The addition of Olaplex, though, helps to rebuild them while your hair is being lifted or processed. VIDEO: Beauty School: Meghan Markle's Signature Messy Low Bun The at-home treatment is designed to do the very same thing after you've already colored your hair. Instead of a conditioner —which is what many post-dye treatments really are — it's specifically made as a strengthening treatment. So as it sits in your hair, it's working to rebuild those injured disulfide bonds. That, in turn, results in stronger, healthier-looking hair with fewer breakages and flyaways. Courtesy How to Use Olaplex 3 To use it, you follow nearly the same routine as you would a regular hair mask, except you don't wash your hair first. You go straight to applying it to damp or towel-dried hair. "Put a quarter-size amount in your hair, work it through and leave it on for an hour or so in the morning," celebrity hairstylist Tracey Cunningham recommends. Hot tip: Cunningham lets it really sink in while she's having coffee and checking her emails. Olaplex's New Serum Gave Me Noticeably Healthier Curls After Just One Use After an hour, she'll head to the shower and shampoo and condition it out. While Cunningham likes to let it sit for a full hour, it only really needs 10 minutes minimum to be effective. For anyone with damaged hair, it's recommended to be used two to three times a week. And while it's really meant to be rinsed out, Cunningham says it can be left in as a styling product to fight frizz — but at $28 a pop, you might want to choose your uses wisely.