Improving anti-hair breakage functionality in shampoos and conditioners is quite an important issue for manufacturers of care products. The presence of broken fibres can be a major detractor in the quest for beautiful hair. This is largely because broken fibres lead to serious damage of the hair as shown in Figure 1, with removed cuticle and exposed cortex fibrils. These broken hair fibres fray and lead to the formation of unsightly split ends. Such fibres no longer align as readily – often reducing the perception of hair smoothness, inducing a degree of frizz, lowering shine, and hindering a fluid, flowing motion. Therefore, consumers worry greatly about breakage and look to product manufacturers for help. A new joint study performed in cooperation with the Textile Research Institute (TRI) Princeton (New Jersey, US) verifies the efficacy of silicone quaternium-22 in conditioners as well as in shampoos.2 The study examined the breakage possibility of hair which was treated with a shampoo (Table 3) and a conditioner (Table 4) containing silicone quaternium- 22. Specifically the treated hair undergoes some defined experiments which are frequently employed to make anti-breakage and even strengthening claims. The methodology utilises a custom-built automated grooming device (Fig. 7; Comb: Head portion of a Goody Purse Style brush). All testing is performed on damaged hair with eight tresses being evaluated per treatment to ensure statistical relevance (Hair: bleached, 3 g, 1-inch wide, 8-inch long). A common method for making such assessments involves repeated combing under controlled conditions (22°C, 60% RH). The strips of hair were subjected to 10,000 strokes of automated combing, followed by counting the number of broken fibres. The results of the experiment are shown in Figure 8. The shampoo and conditioner formulations containing the conditioning ingredient silicone quaternium-22 provide a significant anti-breakage benefit by 60% for shampoo and 88% for conditioner. This high efficiency can be explained by the very good substantivity to the hair keratin, its even distribution and the good lubricity of silicone quaternium-22. Modelling and characterisation of hair breakage can be performed by fitting a Weibull statistical distribution to the experimental data.3 In Table 5 a prediction of hair breakage for 50 and 200 strokes with a comb is shown. Compared to the control and to a shampoo with silicone quaternium-16, the number of broken hairs can be significantly reduced by applying a shampoo with silicone quaternium-22 or even more dramatically by applying a conditioner with silicone quaternium-22.

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