Options for hair care: COSSMA

Hair and beauty is a wide field of investigation for both manufacturers and testing laboratories. The global hair care market records an annual growth of 3% and will exceed $91 billion in 2017 according to a news published by Premium Beauty News. Consumers are constantly seeking new ideas for improving their hair grooming rituals with the help of products that are natural, ethical and sustainable and yet have the same cleansing and caring benefits as traditional products.

There are numerous options for creating fancy hairstyles. The ingenuity of formulators facilitates a broad range of organoleptic designs such as shampoos, soaps, serums, oils, masks and powders.

A multitude of benefits can be created depending on the type of hair and its ethnic background. These include care, volume, anti-frizz, smoothing, straight hair, repair, gloss, shine, colour, fine hair, curly hair, a straightening effect, restore, anti-sebum, anti-dandruff, UV protection, anti-breakage, moisturising, etc.

Hair strength is considered to be one of the main indicators of healthy hair. This and the wide range of other hair beauty properties can be assigned to the following four main categories: wash, treatment and protection, styling and colour.

Hair care claims and testing

Finding the right tests to evaluate claims – the efficacy and safety of hair beauty products and scalp treatments – is a real challenge. Clinical and biometrological tests, as well as use tests, play a key role in research and development for hair and scalp grooming products before going to market. However, finding the relevant testing and a reliable method as well as an experienced testing partner can sometimes be a real challenge. To help cope with the challenge of finding the relevant testing, a reliable method, and an experienced partner, the database Skinobs allows product developers all over the world to identify in vivo efficacy methods and the testing laboratories suitable for any product claim.

The list of the biometrological protocols dedicated to fibres and head testing focusses on these targets: the scalp, the cuticle, the cortex, the hair structure/mechanisms, and growth.

1. Physical aspects of fibre and swelling analysis: hair cross-section by dimensional analysis.

2. Mechanical analysis for suppleness, flexibility, break resistance, smoothness: with tensile, stress relaxation, fibre bending, torsional analysis, combing analysis (wet or dry), friction, curl compression, three-point bend, global hairstyling, anti-frizz, volume, curls, bending force, curl retention, flexible hold, combability, shine: image analysis, hair tune.

3. Hair structure and permeability: infrared microscopy, confocal microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, optical multiphoton tomography, atomic force microscopy, etc.

4. Colour and shine: permeation, colour fade, bleaching test using: Goniolux, Glossymeter, SkinGlossMeter, Samba Hair, Salsa.

5. Specific claims:

Moisturising: Corneometer, Dermalab hydration, Epsilon, MoistureMeter SC, MoistureMeterEpi, MoistureMeterD, etc.
Soothing: Tivi 600, Tivi 8000, Infrared Thermography, etc. …
Anti-sebum: QuantiSeb, Derma-Lab Sebum, Sebumeter, Sebum-Scale including sebum analysis: Shotgun mass spectrometry, Metabolimic MS/MS-16srDNA-PCR (Phylogene), Raman microscopy, etc.
Anti-dandruff: gravimetry and imaging.
Hair loss and hair growth: trichogramm.

In addition to biometrological evaluation, protocols such as the scoring by dermatologists or hair dressers and the insight of consumers via questionnaires, are recommended.

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