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Hair Claims Testing
Laboratory Testing
TRI offers a wide variety of measurement techniques to assess the effects of raw materials, finished products and appliances on hair. This technical verification is commonly at the heart of constructing attractive marketing claims. TRI Princeton’s technical reports are recognized by regulators and advertising authorities around the world as being unbiased and of high quality.
Consumer-Related
End-Benefit Techniques
These methods are used to show how products or devices deliver end-benefits to the whole hair array that are directly consumer relevant (e.g. softness, smoothness, shine etc). These types of techniques also often help support marketing propositions (e.g. “twice as smooth”, “10x less breakage”).
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.
Hair Color Fade
Colorimeter
Hair that has been colored by dye products can fade as a result of various external influences (e.g. washing, heat styling, sun exposure). If you are interested in measuring how your products, or devices, affect these color changes, then you might consider performing hair color fade measurements.
Control of Hair Static
Hair Static Apparatus
The build-up of static electricity in the hair, and hence flyaway, can be an issue in dry air-conditioned buildings, during low humidity winter months and is often problematic during heat styling. If you want to show how your product, or hair styling device, reduces flyaway it might be interesting to measure hair static levels.
Split-Ends Prevention
Automated Repeated Grooming Device
For many consumers, split ends are an important indicator of hair damage. They are formed as the result of chemical processing, heat styling and combing, and arise from the loss of hair cuticle, the external ‘jacket’ that keeps the hair intact.
Dry Hair Smoothness
Surface Friction with the Texture Analyser
Dry hair smoothness is a key preference driver for many hair products, including shampoos and conditioners. Furthermore, restoration of dry hair smoothness is an important signal to consumers of hair damage repair. As a result, hair friction experiments are widely used in the category for performance testing of conditioning systems, and for supporting damage repair claims.
Hair Removal with Chemical Depilatory Products
Skin-Like Model with Embedded Hairs
Depilatory products have been used for hair removal for several hundred years. TRI Princeton now offers a method for testing the efficacy of these products for hair removal through the creation of a skin-like model with embedded hair fibers.
Mode-of-Action Techniques
These methods are used to show how products or devices affect the properties of hair fibers and hair arrays. Data from such studies provides technical verification of product efficacy and are often used in crafting attractive marketing claims.
Hair Strength and Damage
Fatigue Experiments
Fatigue experiments assess the tendency for hair breakage under the repeated application of small deformations. On the one-hand, the approach can be considered a more realistic simulation of consumer practices where grooming represents such a stimulus. But, in addition, these experiments almost always show bigger differences between samples than the traditional tensile testing approach.
Hair Flexibility and Softness
Torsion Experiments
The extensional properties of hair are widely believed to be indicative of the fibers’ internal structure (the cortex) with no meaningful contribution from the outer protective cuticle structure. Conversely, twisting and bending properties are thought to be impacted by the cuticle and their measurement is considered reflective of alterations to this region of hair’s structure. This approach may pick up effects of materials penetration into hair’s outer regions, but which do not reach the inside.
Single-Fiber Hair Thickness and Swelling
Laser Scanning Micrometer
Technical evaluation of hair fiber dimensions is accurately and precisely quantified via use of a laser micrometer. The automated nature of this approach easily allows for screening sufficient fibers for appropriate statistical analysis.
Images of the Hair Surface and Damaged Fibers
Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)
Extremely high magnification SEM experiments provide visualization of hair’s outer cuticle structure. Images show the way by which this structure degrades as a result of external wear and tear (e.g. grooming damage, heat styling damage, chemical treatments, etc.).