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Automated combing apparatus.
Ease-of-Combing
Automated Combing Apparatus
The ability to pass a brush or comb through hair with minimal snagging, tangling and friction is key to the perception of hair conditioning. If you want to know how well your products condition the hair and reduce dry or wet grooming forces, then you may want to consider performing ease-of-combing experiments. These tests correlate to a wide variety of consumer attributes (softness, smoothness, moisturization, etc), and, when performed on damaged hair, they can be used to investigate damage repair.
Testing involves use of an Instron tensile tester to measure frictional forces while a hair tress is pulled through a comb at a controlled speed. Combing experiments are performed in the wet or dry state, after treatment. The Instron is used to measure several parameters: peak combing force, also known as ‘maximum load’, combing energy and average combing force. Tresses are usually combed several times to get accurate measurements.
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Hair combing studies are sensitive to the levels of hair curl and underlying hair damage and are prone to high levels of variability. TRI can advise on the best protocols for your particular study.
TRI Publications
Evans (2011)
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Typical wet combing data. Each colored line is a separate comb cycle. Wet combing data typically show high loads from root to tip. A slight drop-off at the tip-end is related to the separation of the hair into bundles in between the teeth of the comb, and so a reduced number of snags and tangles.