This cult product has been reformulated. But does it live up to the original?
12 years ago, I sat sobbing in Nicola Clarke's chair. I'd had a bleach disaster at another salon, and my hair was fried to a crisp. The renowned celebrity colourist gently lifted random strands, inspecting them with a furrowed brow, before disappearing into the back room of the salon.When she eventually emerged, she was carrying an unmarked plastic bottle, filled with some sort of new hair wizardry to help repair damage to coloured hair. I left with specific instructions to apply the mysterious white liquid three times a week from root to tip for the next three months.That product turned out to be the Olaplex No.3 Hair Perfector, a ground-breaking pre-shampoo repair treatment that launched a whole new category of ‘bond repair’ hair products and revived my frazzled strands. Ever since that fateful visit to Nicola, not a week has gone by that I haven't applied this treatment. That is, until January of this year, when something even better came along.For the past month, I've been testing the new Olaplex No.3 Plus Complete Repair Treatment ahead of its official launch today (3 March, 2026). It's a reformulation of the original bond builder – Olaplex's No.3 Hair Perfector – and, from today, it will replace the original.The premise is the same: Olaplex No.3 Plus is an at-home hair treatment that you apply to damp hair before shampoo to help strengthen the structure of your hair strands and prevent premature breakage.Hair is made up of keratin fibres, which are held together by disulphide bonds. “Disulfide bonds can be found in all hair types and look exactly the same, regardless of race or biological sex, so Olaplex technology repairs what is fundamental to human hair,” says celebrity hairstylist Halley Brisker, whose clients include supermodel Kaia Gerber.Any time you change your hair colour or heat style your hair with a curling iron, you alter and potentially damage these bonds.Olaplex No.3 Plus is powered by Olaplex's hero ingredient – a patented molecule called bis-aminopropyl diglycol dimaleate (Bis-amino for short) – which works from inside hair strands to help repair existing damage, while also protecting against future harm by helping to rebuild broken bonds.Bis-amino does this by binding to three types of bonds that make up a hair strand (disulfide, hydrogen and ionic) where they've been damaged by daily wear and tear, chemical processing and heat styling.
