This defrizzing hair treatment has changed my life

Times

21-06-2025

I have had the most amazing hair treatment. It used to be marketed as 'Hair Botox' before actual Botox objected, but that gives you the idea. It irons out all the frizz, but without the hideous formaldehyde component of comparable treatments of yore. It is also much more effective — life-changingly so, for me. For the first time in my entire life, I can wash and go. I appreciate that most people have always been able to do this, but not me, or at least not for years. As my hair has got finer and as I have had to colour it more often, it has become a hellscape of frizz if left unattended.
The treatment is called Hyrolox and comes via Ondine Cowley at Gielly Green, London (from £400, giellygreen.co.uk). She didn't invent it — that was clever Brazilians — but she refined it and then imported it. When she suggested it might work for me, I was highly sceptical: I do not think of my hair as robust, and for this reason I try to keep well away from chemical treatments. But the idea of it being smooth was irresistible, and she kept saying she thought it would change my life — without harming my hair. On the contrary, she said it would rejuvenate it. Ondine, smooth and gorgeous of lock, has — or had — unmanageably frizzy hair herself (though you would never believe it to look at her), and I'm always encouraged by people who are brilliant adverts for their product. So I went for it, feeling slightly mad for doing so: how could it possibly work on my nightmare hair?
It has changed my life, more than anything I've ever had done other than micro extensions (also at Gielly Green, courtesy of Charlie, a stone-cold genius. I wouldn't dream of seeing anybody else, anywhere. She is amazing at doing extensions for volume on thinning hair, ie me). Tragically the extensions had to come out before the Hyrolox could be applied. It goes on for however long Ondine determines, and your hair is then ironed straight but, crucially, not flat. I don't know how it's not pancake flat, but it isn't. You then have to sleep on it overnight and go back the next day.
It also leaches colour out of your hair: I left the salon not only very thin of hair, but also half grey — I was having my long overdue colour and extensions redone the following day. The bit that wasn't grey was a really startling shade of pale orange. I walked from the salon to my hotel with, literally, a bag on my head, and went to dinner that night with a huge headscarf that kept slipping off. No matter: it was worth it.
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This isn't going to mean anything to many of you, but it will mean everything to those of you who have the same issue: I can wash my hair, rough dry it, and it is perfect. It is shiny, younger-feeling, with not an iota or frizz, dryness, flyawayness or anything else. It is sleek but not flat. It's the best it has looked in years. I have gone from actively avoiding washing it because it takes so long to make it look reasonable to washing it every two seconds because I can't quite believe how smooth and pliable it looks three minutes later. No product, no nothing. Not only that, but it's in the best nick it has ever been in, even though before the Hyrolox it was in the worst nick imaginable. It's the best hair treatment I've ever had and I could not recommend it more highly. I could actually weep with gratitude.
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