Both real hair, and hair replicated using scalp micropigmentation, looks different in different lighting conditions.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to hair. What we’re wearing, how our skin looks and how old we look are all influenced heavily by the level and type of light available at the time. Natural daylight, strong sunlight, harsh indoor lighting and fluorescent lights all make us look different.
Even objects and colours look different. I was shopping over the weekend for decorating paint, and I noticed that Dulux now offer a lighting tunnel to insert those sample colour cards into. The tunnel enables the colour to be viewed in natural daylight, indoor light and under a fluorescent light too. This variation exists and is perfectly normal.
This post follows feedback from clients that their treatments look different depending on the lighting conditions at the time. The usual observation is that the brighter the light, the less visible the pigment deposits become. It is important to note that this same effect is seen in men with very short hair, who haven’t had SMP. It is also more pronounced in men with lighter skin and pigments.
This video was discovered by one of our forum members. After 1:05 the subject removes his helmet to show a head of short hair (he does not have SMP). At 1:30 he is shown again in a different lighting condition, and his hair becomes much harder to see.
Another example can be seen in the photos below:
These photos were taken from this forum thread, and show the same SMP treatment on the same client, in three different lighting conditions.
So what can we learn from this?
We all appear differently depending on the lighting conditions we’re subjected to. Of course this also affects our hair.
Scalp micropigmentation pigments react in exactly the same way as real hair. Although some clients raise a concern about this effect, in reality that’s exactly how you want your pigments to react, just as real hair would react in the same lighting conditions.
