Paper AS-TuP4
Surface Analysis of Human Hair – a Multi-technique Approach

Tuesday, November 8, 2016, 6:30 pm, Room Hall D

In 2016, the global hair care market is estimated to be worth about USD 83.1 billion [1] and the size of the market is growing year on year. There are thousands of products available used for both cosmetic and medical purposes and the industry is constantly developing new formulations to improve performance and safety.

There are numerous treatments and modifications made to hair which involve complex surface chemistry. Products contain many ingredients designed to clean, condition, add volume, shine or treat medical conditions such as dandruff to name but a few. Techniques such as XPS, ToF-SIMS and MALDI-ToF have all been used to characterise the surfaces of natural fibres and investigate the efficacy of such treatments. Recent developments in organic depth profiling using argon cluster sources have also been applied to hair samples opening up an interesting extra dimension [2].

Each of the techniques has its own strengths: XPS provides quantitative elemental identification whereas ToF-SIMS and MALDI are rich in molecular information. Here we use the combination of all three to fully characterise the surface treatment of human hair, in particular the application of conditioner. A range of treatment conditions have been studied, including various concentrations of active ingredients and application methods. As well as investigating the distribution with depth using ARXPS and cluster depth profiling we explore the spatial distribution of species via imaging.

[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/254608/global-hair-care-market-size/

[2] lshikawa, Kazutaka and Okamoto, Masayuki and Aoyagi, Satoka, Biointerphases, 11, 02A315 (2016)