A highly sensitive method to determine the washing resistance of artificial hair colours

Abstract

Citation: IFSCC Magazine, 11 (2008) (2) 139–142Abstract: Due to the improved performance of modern hair colorants, the high natural variability in hair qualities and the individual influences of manual product applications, colour care effects of cosmetic treatments are very difficult to detect. A new, highly sensitive test method to study the colour fading behaviour of human hair was established for a large variety of cosmetic treatments. This method is based on an automatic multistage application of standard wool tissues combined with automatic colour evaluation by means of CIE L × a × b × measurements (DIN 5033). The delta E values are the main interest because they include all information regarding the L (black vs. white), a (red‐green) and b (blue‐yellow) axes defined in the Hunter Lab colour space. For validation of this new method, different permanent and non‐permanent hair colour shades were applied to undamaged light brown Caucasian hair strands. The hair strands were washed manually stepwise 30 times and the colour loss compared with the results obtained on wool tissues using an automatic application system. For most of the investigated hair colours, a coefficient of determination of r2 > 0.99 was achieved. Modern permanent hair colours show a high resistance to cosmetic treatments. Over 90% of the initial colour result was retained after 30 product applications. Shampoo and conditioner formulations induce different degrees of colour loss in hair. In basic formulas significant influences of single surfactants could be detected. The new method using wool tissues correlates very well with that using manually washed Caucasian hair strands. This automatic method is very time‐effective and offers an excellent reproducibility with a high sensitivity for assessing product influences on artificial hair colours.Keywords: Color fading, color protection, color retention, hair color resistance, hair wash simulationPaper presented at the IFSCC Conference 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands