From Essential Research, Hair-Beautifying Technology for Everyone

Human hair is extremely varied, differing according to race, age, gender, and many other factors. This means that consumers’ ideal of beautiful hair is different as well. Through our “essential research,” we have been exploring the nature and properties of hair from various perspectives with the aim of developing hair-beautifying technology for everyone.

Previously, we had established that hair of all kinds, whether brunette, blonde, and so on, tends to lose its shine when damaged because tiny cavities formed inside damaged hair scatter the light. Based on this understanding, we developed a new hair-beautifying technology that does not fill these cavities with some compounds but actually repairs them by acting directly on the fibril proteins from which hair is constituted. This discovery earned an “outstanding paper” award from the American Society of Cosmetic Chemists, and it has been applied to a wide range of hair-care products marketed not only in Japan and other parts of Asia, but also in Europe, North America, and around the world.

In recent years, we have pursued “essential research” to determine the requisites for supple hair, which is particularly valued among Japanese women. As a result of this research, we discovered that in terms of mechanical properties, supple hair has a specific double-layered structure consisting of a flexible outer layer and an elastic inner layer. With this understanding, we succeeded in developing new hair-beautifying technology that selectively modifies the mechanical properties of the outer layer and the inner layer by using specific organic acids that act under specific conditions. This new technology has also recently been applied to our hair products for the Japanese market.
We will continue to deepen our understanding of hair through “essential research” and pursue further development and refinement of our hair-beautifying technology.

Internal structure of supple hair