The hair regenerator made of wood is black and stinky but environmentally friendly

This sustainable, wood -based hair balm can be black and scent on peat, but his creatives claim that it could be a future mowing after the tests suggest that it can work as much as commercial products.

“We use the power of nature,” he says Ievgen Pylypchuk at Stockholm University in Sweden. “We combine a high level of science with old traditions … [to] Get something really cool: Simple, useful and quite effective. “

Pylypchuk and his colleagues used lignin, a polymer that is a central component of wood and bark, as a starting point for their Beladem based on a biological form. When removed from wood, lignin naturally acts with water While acting as a surface active, key component of detergents. It also contains natural antioxidants, which help preserve balm and provide UV protection, says Pypchuk. “Lignin in this context serves as a multi -purpose platform,” he says. “It protects against UV, it is moisturizing.”

The researchers combined the lignin gel developed in their coconut and water laboratory to make the end product. A member of the team Mika SipponenAlso at Stockholm University, he claims that it works almost as much as commercial balms. When used on the patterns of wetly broken human hair and then washed out, it reduced “pulling” when combing hair while it was still moist by 13 percent, compared to the commercial product they tested, which reduced the withdrawal by 20 percent.

One of the potential disadvantages is that the current balm formulation is “black” and smells like “cooked wood”, much like a peat, says Sipponen. This did not distract the researchers from thinking about commercialization. They examined the formula on their hair, towels and pig skin and say that the stain was drunk without leaving. Even the smell is pretty comfortable, Pylypchuk says. “I personally like it, and most people in our lab – maybe because they work with Lignin – they liked them.”

Pylypchuk and Sipponen have a patent For lignin gel and I hope that their conditioner can become a consumer product, offering people a sustainable alternative to current products that rely on the ingredients obtained from fossil fuels. They say it is the next step to see if it causes irritation of the eyes and skin on the eve of any experiment on living hair.

But a cosmetics researcher based in the US Trefor Evans,, Formerly at the Textile Institute for Princeton Research, New Jersey, doubts how well the product will implement compared to commercial rivals. “I have been doing these experiments for 30 years, and a conventional regeneration product will reduce combing forces by 80 percent, maybe 90 percent,” he says. Sipponen believes that variations in the methods of testing and hair states that are analyzed could explain why his team found only a 20 -and -as -decrease in a commercial conditioner.

The appearance and unusual wood -based scent can also exclude consumers, Evans says. “Patent literature is absolutely a chock-bloc with potential hair conditioners that never went anywhere,” he says. “And the reason is that you don’t just need effectiveness – for a consumer to buy it, what you really need is aesthetics.”

So, would a black, wood smell, an environmentally friendly regenerator be a hit with consumers? “It sounds a bit non-stain,” Evans says.