Living here means your hair is fighting a two-front war most of the year. Sun on one side, pool or ocean water on the other, and by August a lot of my clients are dealing with both at once. I see the pattern every summer: Hair that felt fine in May shows up in my chair by July feeling like straw, and usually the person sitting in front of me hasn’t changed a single thing about their routine. Fort Lauderdale changed it for them. This is exactly the kind of damage clients ask me about when they’re looking for an Olaplex treatment in Fort Lauderdale, usually right around the time their hair starts feeling like it’s had enough.
What’s actually happening to the hair itself
Hair gets a lot of its strength from disulphide bonds, chemical bonds inside the hair shaft that hold the whole structure together. UV exposure breaks those bonds down over time, the same way it breaks down almost anything left in direct sun long enough. Chlorinated water can also leave hair dry, rough and more vulnerable to damage, particularly with frequent exposure. The combination of repeated water exposure, chemicals, sun and heat can be especially tough on already-coloured or chemically treated hair. Put someone in a pool for two hours a day, several days a week, all summer, and you’re looking at cumulative bond damage that a regular conditioner was never built to fix.
Copper is the other piece people don’t expect. It’s not actually chlorine that turns light or blonde hair faintly green; it’s copper picked up from pool plumbing and treatment chemicals, and it tends to show up exactly on the hair that’s already been weakened by everything else going on that summer.
Where Olaplex actually fits into this
Olaplex treatments are designed to help repair and strengthen hair that has been weakened by chemical, thermal, and environmental stress. Olaplex treatments are designed to help repair and strengthen hair that has been weakened by chemical, thermal, and environmental stress. That’s different from what a standard conditioner does. A conditioner mainly helps smooth and soften the hair’s surface, while a bond-building treatment is designed to work on the hair’s internal structure.
the hair’s internal strength rather than simply coating the outside of the strand, which is why it serves a different purpose from a traditional conditioning treatment.
I’ll be straightforward about what it can and can’t do. It’s not repairing hair that’s already broken off; nothing rebuilds a split end back into one piece. It can help improve the strength and condition of hair that’s stressed but still intact. to hair that’s stressed but still intact. If your ends are already gone, I’ll recommend a trim alongside the treatment, not instead of it.
What I actually do in the salon
In-salon Olaplex treatments use a higher concentration than anything sold for home use, and I layer it based on what I’m actually seeing in your hair that day. I don’t run the exact same protocol on everyone who walks in for an Olaplex treatment in Fort Lauderdale during peak pool season. Someone who’s been in the ocean every weekend since May needs something different than someone who did two weeks in Aruba and came home. I look at porosity and how much of the damage is at the ends versus distributed through the whole strand before deciding how aggressive to go.
Timing matters too. A treatment done at the start of summer, before three months of sun and pool exposure, behaves like prevention. The same treatment done in September, after the damage already happened, is doing repair work instead. Both are worth doing. They’re just solving different problems.
What actually helps between visits
Rinse your hair with fresh water before you get in a pool. Wet your hair with fresh water before getting into the pool. Hair that’s already saturated with clean water has less room to absorb chlorinated water, which sounds like a small trick and genuinely isn’t. A leave-in conditioner before swimming does something similar, adding a layer between your hair and the pool rather than leaving it to soak straight in.
UV protection sprays exist for hair the same way sunscreen exists for skin, and they’re worth using if you’re outside most of the day. Think of them as one layer of a routine, not a full solution by themselves.
If your hair feels rougher than it did in May, or you’ve noticed that faint green tint creeping in, come sit down with me and I’ll look at what’s actually happening in your specific hair before deciding what it needs. You can see more about what conditioning treatments look like at my salon.
— Randy Schull
