A Hairy Tale

Most of us have a love/hate relationship with hair oil, do we not? As children, we resented being dragged mercilessly by the elders in our family to get our hair oiled before a festival. Then somewhere along the way we grew up and started oiling our hair ourselves- perhaps out of nostalgia or because we started to worry about our hair. In either case, we and our elders were led to believe that oiling our hair was good for health. However, there isn’t sufficient scientific literature to support the claims by hair oil companies about the effectiveness of their products. Therefore, NRG’s M.tech student Rohit Kale is evaluating the impact of different oils on hair and its proteins.?

While this research may initially seem skin-deep (pun intended), it deals with fundamentals of how hair oils may actually benefit hair nourishment and growth. As Rohit stated at the beginning of his presentation, the Indian professional hair care market accounted for $123.42m in 2017 and only continues to grow. Moreover, many Indians suffer from damaged hair due to hair shaft diseases such as Trichorrhexis nodosa, Pili torti scalp and Monilethrix, styling associated damage and even environment-associated damage from detergents and pollutants.?

Rohit then gave us a brief overview of the structure of human hair. A strand of hair goes through 3 growth phases- anagen, catagen and telogen. Most of the hair that we see is in the telogen phase, where the hair strand is visible and protruding. A strand of hair consists of two easily identifiable parts- the root and the shaft. The shaft consists of 3 layers- the inner medulla, the middle cortex and the outermost cuticle. All these layers could be clearly observed during the various analytical tests that Rohit had performed which would therefore help him determine the effects of various hair oils. Some of the oils that he studied were virgin coconut, coconut, mustard, onion and amla (gooseberry).?

Hair samples for this study were collected from one of our Ph.D. students and were cleaned and treated before being subjected to any analysis. To assess the effects of a hair oil, Rohit sought to determine its penetrability into the hair shaft and its ability to repair any damaged hair parts. He is also going to characterise the proteins present in the hair to understand its composition. For this, he has and would be employing various imaging and analytical techniques such as confocal microscopy, atomic force microscopy, 3D Laser Microscopy, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy.

The subject of Rohit’s presentation being familiar to all attendees, it led to a lively discussion among NRGians. Numerous queries were directed, and suggestions were received about the research protocols and the reagents used for sample processing. Rohit now plans to study organic materials from hair samples and will assess the penetration of hair oils across different layers of the hair cuticle. Enjoy your further experiments, Rohit! You may let your hair down!