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Is your hair fine, medium, or coarse? It's not always easy to tell. Healthy hair and dry, environmentally-stressed hair may feel and look very different. You may think your hair is coarse (wide) when it really has some fiber twists and bends (kinking) or is "medium." Dry hair is often described as "coarse" feeling because it feels rough. ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 Measuring is the best way to find out what the dimension of anything actually is. Hair is measured in microns. There are 1000 microns in one millimeter.  ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 Hair Diameter Categories: ©Science-y Hair Blog 2013 Fine hair: Less than 60 microns (16 or more hairs per millimeter) Medium hair: 60-80 microns (12 to 16 hairs per millimeter) Coarse or wide hair: 80 microns or greater (fewer than 12 hairs per millimeter) To do this test, you need about 20 hairs which you have shed, and a metric ruler.  How to choose your sample: We're assuming that hairs you've shed while washing or ...

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-...