Science Wants To Help You Straighten Your Hair Without Frying It

Monday, August 3, 2015 - 16:30 in Physics & Chemistry

These curly locks are in danger. Janine Dupree via Flickr, CC by 2.0 Those of us with unruly, curly manes are constantly searching for ways to tame them. For those who choose to straighten their hair using heat (applied with gadgets like flatirons), getting the desired look without singeing the hair into an amorphous mass is difficult, and the various products that claim to protect hair are a font of misinformation. One curly-haired engineer from Purdue University and her team have taken on the problem; the researchers are presenting their first paper on the heat capacity for different types of hair today at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' International Design Engineering Technical Conference. Put simply, hairs are curly or not because of their chemical structure, influenced by genes and the distribution of...

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