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the IDEAL men's haircoloring product...

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miamicanes View Drop Down
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    Posted: March 17 2003 at 1:01am
Current haircoloring products utterly fail to satisfy the needs of guys who are in their late 20s or 30s, but unfortunate enough to have lots of gray along their temples, sideburns, and other areas likely to be short enough to show new white roots within a matter of days.

* Only permanent haircolor can truly anihilate gray and produce consistent, solid color from roots to ends that looks natural under all lighting conditions (deposit-only color applied to large areas of gray looks blatantly unnatural under halogen spotlights, for instance.)

* Slow-acting chemical reactions produce the most even results with the least damage, but also deposit the most color on skin and leave the worst stains.

* Sparse, short hair along the temples shows new white growth the fastest and worst. Unfortunately, this area also reveals skin stains the worst, and the user is forced to pick his poison: incompletely-covered white roots along the most visible part of his hairline, or risk highly-visible stains along the same area.

* Short hair, particularly along the sides and sideburns, has little ability to mask roots, so new white growth becomes visible within a matter of days. Sometimes, before stains left from the previous coloring have themselves completely faded away.

However, guys have one big, huge advantages over women:

* Guys with short hair can subject it to a lot more concentrated abuse in a short period of time than a woman who needs to keep hair cells emerging today healthy and good-looking for the next few months or years would ever DARE to even THINK about.

What I suggest for manufacturers as a superior product to meet that particular market's needs is a 2 (optionally 3) stage process that would provide the best of all possible worlds using current haircolor technology.

The Stage 1 product is nearly identical to current permanent haircolor: peroxide is mixed with a solution containing ammonia and dye precursors, applied to the hair, and left in place for 45-90 minutes. It softens the hair cuticle, flows inside, and solidifies into long polymer chains inside the cortex while simultaneously lifting the natural color by 1-4 levels. There's a difference, though -- the dye precursors that ultimately form polymer chains is basically colorless... or at least close enough to the user's own skin color that staining isn't a big problem. As a result, it can be left in place long enough to gently, but thoroughly do its job. Since there's a limit to just how big the polymer chains can get and how many molecules can ultimately fit into any given cross section of hair shaft, and a limit to just how much the natural color can be lifted -- even with repeated applications of ammonia + peroxide, a "steady state" condition is reached after 2 or 3 applications whereby the shaft is stuffed as full as it can possibly be, and had its natural pigment lifted about as far as anything short of bleach is going to achieve. With twice-weekly application, that basically means that all but the most recent week and a half of hair growth will have reached that steady-state condition.

The Stage 2 product is the pigment itself. Its molecules are engineered to grab on to the surface of the polymer chains formed by Stage 1 really, really fast and hard (kind of like existing hair dye applied to bleached hair), but not have much affinity (ability to stick) for anything else (like skin, or other pigment molecules). Basically, the user saturates his hair with the second chemical, leaves it on for a couple of minutes, and washes it off. It doesn't stain the skin, because it doesn't really come into contact with it long enough to make much of a difference anyway, and it doesn't really "build up" along already-colored areas, because already-coated polymer chains don't really have much in the way of exposed surface area for it to stick to.

The optional Stage 3 product would be a special color remover that only needs to be used if the user wants to try a different color altogether. It's a chemical that has even MORE affinity for the pigment molecules than the polymer chains themselves... but it's a small molecule (small enough to easily flow into the cortex and bathe it), and each color-remover molecule can only bond with a single pigment molecule, so the resulting remover + pigment molecule is still small enough to slip through the openings in the hair shaft and wash away.

As an added bonus, the user doesn't have to be particularly careful to avoid applying Stage 1 chemical to previously-treated hair... and WILL want to overlap a little bit, just to avoid mid-shaft bands. Remember... once the cortex is packed full of polymer chains, no more are really going to fit inside anyway regardless of how many more times the area is subjected to the Stage 1 chemical, nor is it going to lighten much past golden yellow. Since the pigment only creates a 1-molecule deep surface coating of the polymer chains, but the pigment molecules themselves are hyper aggressive about grabbing on to any available surface area, applying pigment to already-pigmented areas will neither help nor hurt; it'll flow in, fail to stick to anything, and wash away.

Finally, for guys with REALLY short hair (say, 1.5" MAX at its longest point), a more aggressive and faster-acting Stage 1 chemical might be available that can do the job in 20-30 minutes :-)

Oh, as for packaging: since this is obviously something that's going to be used frequently and significant volume, single-use packages just won't cut it. What I'd propose is selling the Stage 1 product in multi-use dispensers kind of like those used for Mentadent toothpaste (peroxide on one side, colorless dye precursor and ammonia on the other), and selling the Stage 2 product directly in squeeze bottles (say, 8-12oz, kind of like ketchup squeeze bottles with pointed nozzles on the end).

Opinions?
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