My Experience with Olaplex & Hair La Vie

Welcome back beauties! If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed I’ve been super busy lately with weddings and other shenanigans, but hopefully over the next couple of weeks I will pick up the pace again when it comes to my blog posts. The first review I wanted to share with you is of the hair repair treatment Olaplex. You may have heard about this quite revolutionary treatment already, so when I heard that my local salon was offering the treatment in salon and a take home version, I snapped up both. I’m onto my second bottle of the take home version of the treatment and I’ve been consistently using it, so I couldn’t wait to report back to you 🙂 I’ll also do a really short brief first impressions of the Hair La Vie supplements – I say first impressions because I only bought a three month supply (and won’t be buying any more – see below for details) and in order to see real results with hair supplements, you must be taking them for 3-6 months at least.  But first, let’s start with the Olaplex!

So what makes Olaplex a revolutionary hair treatment? Olaplex claims that it’s treatment doesn’t just smooth over porous, damaged hair, it reconnects broken disulfide sulfur bonds in the hair. These bonds in your hair are made up of many keratin proteins, one of which contains a sulfur atom (this protein is called cysteine). It is these bonds in the proteins, which give your hair it’s shape and strength. There’s lots of science behind how the product repairs damaged links and bonds in your hair (a really easy and informative post was written by Lab Muffin) but what has made this treatment so popular is the great word of mouth coming from Olaplex’s customers. There are other products out there which claim to ‘fix’ these bonds, but Olaplex’s patent does seem to make it stand apart from other products (find a comparison here).  These bonds in the hair are damaged most by colouring and especially bleaching of the hair. I colour and lighten my hair regularly (every 5-6 weeks). I had very light blond hair as a kid and now my natural colour would probably be a mousey blond (apparently 70% of Polish women have this hair colour) which makes my very fine hair look very flat. Over the last year or two, my hair has become increasingly damaged. I don’t actually believe this is because I colour my hair – I think other biological factors are primarily at play like stress, but of course, any damage sustained from colouring is then multiplied. I have noticed that my hair breaks pretty easily at the roots, so I was really hoping and praying this treatment would help a sister out 😉

Olaplex can be used in two ways – as a treatment mixed into your hair colourant, to prevent damage from occurring and after colouring, as a more traditional treatment. So far, I have had three hair colours at the salon with Olaplex and I’m onto my second bottle of the take home version of the treatment.  After my first salon treatment/colour using Olaplex, there was a difference with both the look and texture of my hair. I noticed the difference most of all with the appearance of my hair, while my hairdresser noticed the texture was much better and stronger. Here are some photos after my very first Olaplex treatment for you to judge the results!

Above: Before colouring and treating my hair with Olaplex.

Above: Before colouring and treating my hair with Olaplex.

Above: After my colour and treatment using Olaplex.

Above: After my colour and treatment using Olaplex.

 As you can see from the photos above, the difference is massive! Of course a good cut and styling helps, but I can report that my hair has been stronger over the last couple of months. I use the take home treatment once a week religiously (you leave it in your hair for 10minutes or more, before washing and conditioning your hair) and I’ve noticed less breakage near my roots and that’s saying something over the long run. Regular hair masks usually improve the condition of my hair for a few days and then the effect wears off with time. I don’t think Olaplex has minimised split ends from what I can tell and this could be because it’s a different type of damage of the hair (my split ends usually arise from physical damage, such as rough styling, environmental damage etc). That’s my theory anyway 😉

The little take home treatment bottle isn’t huge – it contains 100ml of product and costs around $70, but for me it lasts 10-12 weeks when using it once a week. As I mentioned, I have fine hair and it isn’t very long, so this is why it probably works out to be a little more economical for me. You don’t need a lot of the product, it has the consistency of a light conditioner, so it spreads and covers the hair easily. If you have longer or much thicker hair, one bottle will probably last you half the time frame (so about 6-7 weeks). Adding Olaplex to my hair colour at the salon (they also do a treatment after my colour is washed out) raises my colour’s cost by about $30. It’s definitely not the cheapest treatment out there, but I do think it’s effective and delivers results. I will definitely keep asking for it to be added to my colour at the salon in order to mitigate the damaging effects it may have on my hair, but if I become more broke over the next couple of weeks, I may just take a break from the at home treatment for a little while. It is something I can hopefully keep using for a long time to come! You can only buy Olaplex from a hair salon and a good trusted hairdresser always helps! If your regular hair salon doesn’t carry it, you can contact the distributer haircareaust for more details or Olaplex via their Australian website.

Hair La Vie is an American brand of hair supplements, which has led a pretty successful PR campaign on Youtube and via beauty bloggers. I decided to give them a go and put them to the test. I didn’t take pictures every couple of weeks to show that my hair was growing, as it would grow with or without the supplements – and I figured I could tell if my hair was growing faster than usual, by how quickly I would need to get my regrowth re-coloured lol As I mentioned above, I only tried a three month supply of the vitamins so this isn’t a fully fledged review (for maximum impact, you need to take the vitamins every day for 3-6 months). It’s safe to say, that the supplements in that short time, didn’t make my hair grow faster. I’ve seen reviews where people have stated that they can see a difference within two weeks – however, I’d be wary of those reviews (did you know that a hair’s full cycle of growth can last two years??!).

I did however, notice that my eyebrows were a little fuller and had some new growth in areas that were very sparse previously. I don’t know if this is directly linked to the supplements or the fact that I have been lazy in maintaining them lately. The only reason I won’t be repurchasing them, is because you can only buy them via the US website and as the Aus dollar keeps going down, they are becoming rather expensive. It’s $39 per bottle, but you can buy a three pack for $109 (which makes each bottle $36.33). These are US prices and one bottle will last you for one month. You also have to pay for postage, which of course drives the price up. If they were magical, I would consider repurchasing them, but I can’t otherwise…

The capsules aren’t tiny, but they aren’t massive either – I know that’s not helpful at all lol! They are the size of a regular fish oil capsule if that helps. If you’re bad with swallowing tablets, this could be an issue for you. The ingredient list is great, so if you’d like to see the main ingredients within this capsule, check out Hair La Vie’s site here. One other warning if you do end up trying these supplements, is that via the checkout process, once you have confirmed your payment details, Hair La Vie will try and up sell you other products and even more bottles of the supplements. If you click on one of these deals for more info – you won’t get more info, you will be automatically charged for the additional up sell deal and it will be added to your order (no conformation is needed). I learnt the hard way and had to end up cancelling part of the deal which actually meant that I LOST money because of different conversion rates on different days – I know – I was mega annoyed. I’ll keep you updated in regards to other supplements I may try in future (and hopefully I can take them for a longer period of time and report back with a full review!).

Have you heard of Olaplex before beauties? Would you give it a go? Have you tried hair supplements before? Let me know in the comments below!

Catch ya next time,

Beauty Bee~

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