Inform 5.5: One Month Review & How to Use It
Inform 5.5: One Month Review & How to Use It
Most hair care routines are built around the same idea: cleanse, then coat. Shampoo removes dirt and oil. Conditioner or treatment smooths the surface back down. It feels effective — hair looks shinier, feels softer — but nothing about that process actually rebuilds what's happening inside the hair.
For anyone with colour, bleach, perm, or straightening history, that gap matters. Here's why, and what a month of using a strengthening booster alongside your normal shampoo actually does.
The Problem: Surface care can't fix internal damage
Chemical services work by breaking bonds inside the hair — specifically the disulfide (SS) bonds that hold the internal keratin structure together. That's how colour, perm, and straightening treatments physically reshape or lighten hair. The service closes some of those bonds back up, but not all of them, and every wash, every heat styling session, and every UV exposure afterward continues to wear down what's left.
Most daily shampoos and treatments never touch this layer. They're designed to clean and to smooth the cuticle (the outer layer), which is why hair can feel fine on the surface while still being structurally weak underneath — prone to breakage, snapping mid-length, or feeling thin and limp despite a good haircare routine.
The Cause: Nothing in a normal wash reinforces the internal bonds
The building block of those internal SS bonds is sulphur — it's what's left when you break keratin down to its smallest unit. Regular shampoo formulas don't carry usable sulphur into the hair, and even good conditioners and masks mostly work by coating the cuticle rather than penetrating and reinforcing the cortex where the real structural damage sits.
Without something addressing that layer, the only way most people "improve" their hair is by preventing further damage — which helps, but doesn't rebuild strength that's already been lost.
The Solution: A booster that penetrates instead of coats
Inform 5.5 is designed to work at that internal level rather than the surface. It combines two things:
- A molecular subdivision solution which, according to the manufacturer's published specification, has roughly 40 times the penetrating power of water. It's formulated at pH 5.5 — close to hair's natural pH — so it doesn't force the cuticle open the way alkaline products do. Instead, it moves through the hair without letting internal moisture and nutrients leak back out, and it carries the good ingredients from your existing shampoo in deeper with it.
- Liquefied sulphur, delivered directly to the cortex, where it helps reinforce the SS bonds that give hair its structural strength.
It isn't a treatment in the traditional sense — it doesn't smooth the surface, so you still need your usual conditioner afterward. Think of it as reinforcing the scaffolding underneath, rather than polishing the outside.
How to Use It
The routine is simple enough to build into an existing shower routine without adding a step:
Wet your hair and scalp thoroughly, as normal.
Add 2–3 pumps of Inform 5.5 (3–5 if hair is more damaged) into your regular shampoo in your palm and mix.
Wash as usual, working the mixture through and leaving it on for a minute if you can before rinsing.
Rinse thoroughly.
Follow with your usual conditioner or treatment — this step isn't optional. Inform 5.5 strengthens the inside; your conditioner still needs to seal and smooth the outside.
It's safe for daily use and formulated so it penetrates the hair shaft without reaching the scalp, so there's no build-up concern with everyday application. It also works alongside any shampoo or treatment brand — it's designed as an add-in, not a replacement.
What One Month of Use Looks Like
Because it works on internal structure rather than surface coating, the effect isn't a dramatic day-one difference the way a smoothing treatment can feel. It's cumulative — each wash adds a small amount of reinforcement, and the change becomes noticeable over several weeks rather than several days.
By around the one-month mark of daily use, the most commonly reported changes are:
- Noticeably less breakage and fewer split ends forming
- Hair that feels like it has more "body" — more resistance when you run your fingers through it, rather than feeling limp or overly soft
- Colour and perm results holding slightly longer, since a stronger internal structure resists the ongoing breakdown that causes fading and drop-out
- Less day-to-day frizz, particularly for hair that's been chemically processed multiple times
If you're using it as a pre-treatment before a colour, perm, or straightening service, the difference shows up differently — in how evenly the chemical service processes and how much less damage it causes in the process, since the hair is starting from a stronger baseline.
Key Takeaways
- Shampoo and conditioner clean and coat hair — neither rebuilds the internal bonds that chemical services and daily wear break down.
- Sulphur is the structural building block of those bonds, and most routines never deliver any of it back into the hair.
- Inform 5.5 adds 2–5 pumps to your existing shampoo, using a pH 5.5 penetration technology to carry liquefied sulphur into the cortex without opening the cuticle.
- Results build cumulatively — expect the clearest difference around the one-month mark, not immediately.
- Always follow with your usual conditioner — Inform 5.5 strengthens from the inside, it doesn't replace surface conditioning.
Written by the KAMI Lab team.