What's the price to pay for women to have beautifully colored hair?

While it's commonly known as one of the creative ways to express individuality, hair dye ingredients aren't the most forgiving towards the scalp and hair.

A common ingredient in hair dyes is ammonia, "a swelling agent for the hair cuticle." It ups the chances of "absorption of hair color into the hair," according to skinkraft.com.

Ammonia also "influences lightening" and works with "natural hair colors and melanin to produce better results," reports hairstylecamp.com.

While this agent makes up for the hours one spent on a salon chair, ammonia is hazardous as it can damage the "hair cortex and makes the hair rough and weak due to loss of tensile strength. It also triggers more greying as the cuticle is no longer fit enough to hold the melanin (your natural hair color)," as stated by Dr. Zeel Gandhi, hair care expert at SkinKraft.

With these in mind, it's easy to think that having vibrant yet healthy dyed hair is out of the picture. However, L'Oréal Professionnel's latest innovation is proving that one shouldn't have to sacrifice one or the other.

Enter the newly improved iNOA, the French brand's ammonia-free hair colorant.

First launched in 2009, iNOA uses oil to deliver high-impact color. The ODS technology propels the pigments inside the hair enough without ammonia. It also creates a healthy-looking color with a shiny, lively and true-to-tone result.

Vouching for the product is senior stylist and educator of L'Oréal Professionnel Australia Brendan Moroney who said during the Philippine launch last 25 April: "(It has) better color performance, so the result customers are getting from iNOA is absolutely stunning. With its beautiful reflects and dimensional color, the hair is left feeling really beautiful, soft and shiny."