At this point, “bond repair” is everywhere. It’s on our shampoos, masks, leave-ins and salon treatments, usually with the promise of stronger, healthier hair. But unless you have a chemistry degree handy, what exactly is being repaired can get fuzzy fast.
That’s where Jared Reynolds comes in. A biochemist, molecular biologist and founder of ACTIIV and Zenagen, Reynolds has spent years studying hair and scalp health and developing formulas around the biology behind both. His latest project, ACTIIV’s INTEGRITYrx system, takes a broader look at hair repair by considering multiple types of bonds and structural stress rather than focusing on a single pathway.
We asked Reynolds to take us back to hair science 101: what a bond actually is, what bleach, heat and everyday styling are doing to our strands, and whether the bond repair products filling our showers are addressing the whole picture.
“Bond repair” has become one of the biggest terms in hair care. When people hear that phrase, what is actually happening inside the hair strand?
“When we talk about “bond repair,” we’re really talking about restoring or supporting some of the structural interactions that give a hair fiber its strength, shape and resilience.
Hair is primarily made of keratin proteins, and those proteins are held together through several different types of chemical interactions. Disulfide bonds are probably the most recognized because they’re strong covalent bonds and play an important role in hair’s structure. But they’re not the entire story. There’s more things we need to consider. In addition to disulfide bonds, hair also relies on hydrogen bonds, ionic or salt bonds, protein structure, the integrity of the cuticle and the lipid environment surrounding the fiber.
When hair is chemically processed, exposed to repeated heat or subjected to mechanical stress, you’re not necessarily damaging just one of those things. You can have oxidation, protein loss, increased porosity, cuticle disruption and reduced elasticity happening at the same time.
That distinction became very important to us when developing INTEGRITYrx. We didn’t want to look at damaged hair through a single bond lens. We wanted to look at the integrity of the entire fiber.”
Bond repair products tend to focus heavily on disulfide bonds, but hair contains several types of bonds and structural components. Can you explain what each of these does, and how different stressors like bleach, color, heat, and everyday styling affect them differently?
One of the misconceptions created by the bond repair category is that there is one type of bond responsible for healthy hair. There isn’t.
Disulfide bonds are strong covalent bonds within keratin that contribute significantly to the hair’s permanent structure. A lot of traditional bond building technology has understandably focused on these bonds, particularly because chemical services such as bleaching can disrupt that chemistry. But hair also relies on hydrogen bonds and ionic, or salt, bonds. They’re weaker and more dynamic than disulfide bonds, but they’re incredibly important to how the fiber behaves.
Hydrogen bonds are repeatedly disrupted and re-formed through everyday exposure to water, humidity and heat. Ionic bonds are influenced by the hair’s chemical environment, including changes in pH, which becomes especially relevant during professional color and chemical services.
That’s one of the reasons we developed INTEGRIFLEX Technology within INTEGRITYrx. Rather than approaching damage exclusively through the traditional disulfide bond pathway, INTEGRIFLEX was designed to support hydrogen and ionic interactions associated with the hair’s strength, flexibility and structural integrity. And that difference matters because real world damage isn’t happening through one pathway.
A client may bleach her hair every eight weeks, use a blow dryer several times a week, flat iron it, expose it to humidity and water, and brush it every day. Those are very different forms of stress acting on the same fiber.
We wanted to look beyond a single bond and address the broader structural environment that allows hair to remain strong but flexible.
When you looked at how most bond repair products were addressing damage, what did you think they were overlooking, and how did that shape ACTIIV’s approach to INTEGRITYrx?
Bond repair has been an important advancement in hair care, but I felt the category had become too narrowly defined. The conversation was largely centered around one type of bond, disulfide bonds, and then around repairing hair after the damage had already occurred.
From a molecular biology perspective, I kept coming back to the fact that hair damage is much more complex than that. A chemically processed hair fiber isn’t experiencing one isolated event. You’re changing its chemical environment, exposing it to shifts in pH, affecting multiple structural interactions and then asking that same fiber to withstand heat, water, friction and mechanical stress over and over again.
So with INTEGRITYrx, we started with a different question: What if we looked at the entire damage cycle instead of one bond or one moment of repair?
That led us in a few different directions. With INTEGRIFLEX Technology, we focused on supporting hydrogen and ionic bonds, two dynamic types of interactions that haven’t traditionally been the center of the bond repair conversation. Separately, we developed BioREPAIIR Complex as a multi-action blend because there are aspects of compromised hair that extend beyond bonds altogether.
And then there was prevention. Processing Shield was a major piece of what I felt was missing. Instead of waiting until the chemical service is finished to begin addressing damage, we created a professional only first step designed to help protect the hair during processing itself.
So INTEGRITYrx isn’t our version of a traditional bond builder. It’s our answer to what bond repair and the hair industry as a whole has been missing. We’re looking at multiple forms of structural stress, multiple points in the damage cycle (internal and external), and both protection and repair.
The evolution is: don’t wait for damage, don’t reduce hair science to a single bond, and don’t assume repair ends when the client leaves the salon.
When developing hair products as a molecular biologist, what does testing look like before you are comfortable saying a formula actually improves the condition or strength of hair?
For me, testing has to go beyond whether a product makes the hair feel better. If we’re going to say we’ve improved the performance or condition of the hair, I want objective data behind that statement.
With INTEGRITYrx, we made a significant investment in independent testing and clinical work. We partnered with TRI Princeton, one of the leading independent hair and skin research organizations, to evaluate the products using established testing methodologies. And importantly, we didn’t only test INTEGRITYrx against untreated hair. We put our formulas head-to-head against leading products in the category.
That was important to me. We weren’t developing INTEGRITYrx in a vacuum. We knew the level of performance already available to professionals and consumers, and if we were going to introduce a new approach to damage repair, I wanted to understand how it actually performed against that benchmark.
Depending on the claim, that means looking at different measurable endpoints, breakage protection, frizz control, split end repair, thermal protection and other indicators of fiber performance. We also invested in clinical testing to substantiate the consumer facing benefits of the formulas. It’s a much more rigorous and expensive development process, but I believe that’s what gives you the confidence to make meaningful claims.
My molecular biology background probably makes me more demanding about that process. I don’t want to formulate a product, create a marketing story around it and then go looking for data that supports the story. We formulate with an objective, test it independently, benchmark it against the category, and let the results tell us what we can responsibly say.
With INTEGRITYrx, we wanted the science to be more than something printed on the packaging. If we’re going to say we’ve advanced the category, we should be willing to put the product head-to-head with the category and prove it.
