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©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 I’ve wanted to post this for a while, but it makes me feel a bit subversive because I’m going to tell you that what you think you’re doing with hair conditioner is a wee bit wrong. This is my "ingredient-based" perspective. Not so many years ago, women washed their hair with bar soap. Many of them knew if they used water from their rain barrels (rainwater) that their hair would shine – because rainwater is soft water so there is less soap scum left on hair. People did not wash their hair often. Nor their bodies. Especially in winter. Now that so many of us shower daily and have hundreds of soaps and shampoos to choose from, it’s easier to over-cleanse the hair. Enter the “cream rinse.” A cream rinse is the ancestor of modern conditioners. – in the U.S. it was Breck and Wella Balsam that led the pack with fairly simple formulas that helped detangle hair which was dried out from frequent shampooing or damaged by teasing or hairspray and a multitude of ...

Ken and his plastic hair. One of the greatest differences for medium to coarse hair vs. fine hair is an element of flexibility. In cosmetics science, it is sometimes called plasticity. This isn’t about plastic hair (but I can’t resist a photo of Ken, Barbie's anatomically ambiguous "friend"). Oils, conditioning agents like cationic quaternary surfactants (your conditioner probably has them), fatty alcohols like cetyl alcohol and “butters” like shea butter and silicones all add plasticity to hair. So might proteins, amino acids and humectants. ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 When we think “plastic” in everyday life, we usually think of hard or semi-hard plastic boxes and containers. But in biology, physics and engineering, “plasticity” means the object in question has flexibility, it can be molded (deformed) and is pliable. In this post , I suggested that one of the troubling issues for fine hair is that it can have an excess of plasticity – it is very easily deformed. ©Science-...

I've been working on this post for a while, my research has answered a lot of my questions and I hope it does for you too. While this post is about curling, it's also about how hair kinks because the structural foundation is probably the same. Curling or coiling hair is when hair curves around a "center" which is larger than the actual hair shaft. Imagine your hair curling around a toothpick, a pencil, a magic marker... Kinking is when hair twists on it's own axis . Kinking hair almost always curls or waves too. Which gives you the 1) hair twisting on its own axis, superimposed by 2) hair rotating around an imaginary axis. Pretty cool! The same research I'm using for curling applies to kinking hair. Wavy, curly, and tightly curled/coiled hair may or may not have kinking - but all these curl patterns can include some form of kinking. ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 The cortex of the hair is where curliness is determined. “Cortex” comprises 75% of what you see as “hai...

This post is timely to those of us in the Northern Hemisphere - to our friends and family in the Southern Hemisphere - hope you are enjoying spring into summer! Humidity is water vapor suspended in the air. How humidity is measured: Dewpoint – the temperature at which the air is saturated with as much water as it can hold, and so dew (or fog) forms. Dewpoint tells us the most about how dry the air is. Unless a new air mass moves in, the dewpoint can stay the same all day. This is what you want to watch to know just how moist or dry the air is. Dewpoints below 50° F (10° C) are “dry.” In the 50s  (10-15° C) is “comfortable” 60-65° (15- 18° C) is “muggy” 65-70° (18-21° C) is “humid” 70° (21° C) and greater is “oppressive” – rainforest-y - you feel you need to grow gills This is important for hair because dewpoint tells you how much moisture is in the air. Except for hair which has a very strong curl pattern, low moisture in the air tends to lead to flatter, less defined wavy or curl...

I'm going for long-winded again, but you get pictures at the end as a reward... Hair is a fibrous, proteinaceous system which can absorb fluids. How porous or absorbent your hair is has a lot to do with how it looks and can help you decide what to use on your hair to help it look it’s best. A porosity is a hole or a gap – an opening. For example, teeth are slightly porous and that is why they can be stained by coffee or tea. Limestone is porous and so water can run through it (a groundwater aquifer). Concrete can be porous and so the inside of concrete basements can become damp when the outside soil is saturated with water. ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 Hair which is porous will take on water and other chemicals easily because of all the tiny openings in the cuticle. Most of these openings only go from the outside world to a deeper layer of cuticle. Porous hair has little flaps of cuticle sticking up. These areas can be “patched” – stuck down or filled in temporarily by hydrolyzed prot...

What defines wavy hair? ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 Let’s start with this warning. Lots of us who must go online to learn how to care for our hair encounter a hair typing system. On the surface, it can help us understand what we have. But let me say now that I hate labels and categorizing. Remember the “blue eyes / brown eyes experiment?” Yeah, you get the picture. More on this later. First, some quick and dirty “bioengineering.” ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 Hair curls or waves because of the composition of proteins in the cortex of hair fibers and how the strands of proteins are arranged in the hair’s cortex (the mid-portion of the hair strand). There are cells in the cortex of some people’s hair called orthocortical cells, accompanied by paracortical cells, and mesocortical cells. How curly hair will be is determined by the proportion of these cells relative to each other, where they are located in the cortex, and what is the protein composition of the orthocortical cells. ©Science-y Hair...