If you are interested in how well your hair conditioning product, or styling device, prevents hair breaking during repeated brushing or combing, then you may consider performing a repeated grooming test.

The ability to pass a brush or comb through hair with minimal snagging, tangling or friction is key to consumer perception of hair condition.  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.

If you want to show how well your product improves hair shine or luster, then you might consider performing a hair shine test.

Image analysis is used to assess the shape of heat straightened hair in the presence of elevated humidity conditions. High quality photographs show the progressive reversion of the hair shape as a result of the external stimulus.

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 color fade measurements.

The build-up of static electricity, which can lead to frizzy or flyaway hair, can be an issue in air-conditioned buildings during the 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 or hair frizz, it might be interesting to measure hair static levels.

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.

Fast ease of rinse is an important preference driver for all conditioning products, and for reducing water usage in the shower. This three-point-bend test can be used as a dynamic measure of wet lubrication effects and reflect what customers experience when using a product.

Depilatory products have been used for hair removal for several hundred years.  TRI Princeton offers a method for testing the efficacy of these products for hair removal through a fully customizable skin-like model with embedded hair fibers.

If you want to show how your products deliver volume and body to hair, then you might consider performing a tress volume test.

There are a range of approaches to protecting the hair from heat styling damage. The benefits of heat protection technologies can be measured using Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and automated repeated grooming.

Our anti-pollution test for gaseous pollution uses a custom-built chamber that is able to pass exaggerated levels of ozone pollution over the surface of the hair.

This test uses a custom-built pollution chamber that is able to deposit pollutant particles evenly, accurately and reproducibly over the surface of a number of tresses.

If you want to show how your product reduces hair drying times, or how fast your blow-drying device dries the hair versus others, then you might want to consider the speed of drying test.

For many consumers, split ends are an important indicator of hair damage. They are formed as a result of chemical processing, heat styling and combing, and arise from the loss of the hair cuticle, or the external ‘jacket’ that keeps hair fibers intact.

The degree of hair alignment in a tress can be measured using image analysis (Rumba™, Bossa Nova Vision). This test can be used for the quantification of hair straightening and frizz control benefits.

The degree of hold provided by styling polymers can be measured using the three-point bending test. In addition to stiffness (or hold), this test can also measure humidity resistance and toughness.

Image analysis is used to assess the longevity of hair curls in the presence of elevated humidity conditions. High quality photographs show the curl integrity as a function of time.

Our UV protection studies use an instrument to artificially expose hair to high levels of simulated sunlight.

This test involves the combing of bundles of textured hair, whilst they are still wet. Hair bundles are combed manually, and the broken fibers collected underneath.

For consumers with textured hair, the ability to pass a brush or comb through wet hair with minimal snagging, tangling or friction is vital for treating and styling the hair more easily and for minimizing hair breakage. The ease of comb test can be used to support a wide range of claims (softness, smoothness, moisturization, etc).

Many consumers with textured hair would like longer and looser curls. The curl elongation test is a useful test for investigating product performance and for supporting curl elongation claims.

Hair products can improve hair shine in a variety of ways, which the most common techniques being the addition of conditioners or controlling hair fiber alignment. However, measuring shine for textured hair requires specialist techniques, which we have developed at TRI.

The 3-point cantilever bending technique is a test used to measure the flexibility of a hair tress. It involves applying a force at a specific point between two supports and measuring the amount of deflection at the middle point. The amount of deflection measured can be used, in this test, as a measure of softness.