The $3 solution to killing fly-away hairs.

Image via iStock. 

We do a lot of things to our hair that it probably doesn’t love. We dye it, we straighten it, we blast it with blow dryers and tug on it with barrel brushes. We take it out in the middle of the Sydney storm because we can’t go another second without coffee, gale force winds be damned…

One thing we don’t do regularly is apologise to our hair. Which would be fine if it was any other kind of dead protein growing out of our bodies (I know, it’s gross, but that’s just what hair is #sorrynotsorry). But when it comes to our head-blanket, we should be a little kinder. Mostly because if we’re not, it will exact fluffy, split-ended vengeance upon us.

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Steve Schiel, Scientific Director for P&G, explains: “People are less and less patient with seeing results, so making sure that you notice something from a product initially is important. With hair especially… Hair is dead, it isn’t going to repair itself, so there’s a sense that whatever’s going to happen to it is going to happen now.”

It’s that ‘instant gratification’ philosophy that led Schiel and his team to the development of the ultimate quick-fix hair apology, a treatment from Pantene called the Three Minute Miracle.

“Typically when we develop products, we think about them in two ways. You have to have the chronic benefits, those are the things that build up over time. Because some things take time. Then you have acute benefits, those are signals that are built into the product so people notice something.” (Post continues after gallery.)

In the case of the Three Minute Miracle, the ‘acute’ benefit is basically a spack-filler for your snaggly bits, a formulation called ‘BT Marc’ that fills in the holes in the outermost layers of your hair (its cuticles) for a smoothed out appearance.

Meanwhile, the longer term benefit is increased nourishment to the layers underneath your hair cuticle. In combination, the treatment is meant to reverse up to three months damage in its titular three minutes.

“When it comes to restoring the condition of your hair, that’s something that usually takes a couple of weeks to build in. It’s the same with skincare products, if you’re fundamentally going to make a difference, it’s not going to happen over night. But at the same time you still need the moisturisation, volume and conditioning, you notice quickly,” Schiel says of this two pronged approach.

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It’s natural to be skeptical of anything with the word ‘Miracle’ in its name, but in Beijing, where I met with Schiel, a cadre of beauty writers were given a live demonstration of the product’s effect. A pair of identical twins were sent out on stage, one who had just used the treatment, and one who hadn’t. Then, they touched their hands to an electrostatic generator and this was the result:

While they both have a bit of fly-away happening, as you can see, the twin on the right’s situation is significantly worse. You can probably guess where I’m going with this - she was the one who hadn’t treated her hair.

So, could this be the solution to smoothing your hair in crazy weather? Possibly. At $2.99 a pop, it certainly couldn’t hurt to try..