Hair relaxation after shaping – A kinetic approach

Abstract

OBJECTIVEHair fibres have been shaped via either a thermal route or via a chemical route. The time‐relaxation transients of the shaped hairs in air, and in water, respectively, were evaluated. The collected data were kinetically modelled in order to reveal information about the rate controlling mechanism of the recovery process.METHODSHair fibres were thermally shaped at different temperatures between heated plates and left to relax in an environment of controlled humidity and temperature. Different hair fibres were chemically shaped and left to relax in water of different controlled temperatures. Relaxation data were used for modelling the kinetics of the recovery processes by using exponential and logarithmic kinetic laws. The fitting of the models to the two sets of data has been checked by using the residual sum of squares for matching the proper model to each set of data.RESULTSThe processes of shaping and recovery were assimilated with a sequence of two successive quasi‐chemical reactions, occurring at the used temperatures. Based on chemical and physical assumptions, the two groups of experiments were modelled by two different laws: an exponential law, suggesting a first‐order process as the rate‐determining step of the relaxation of thermally shaped fibers, and a logarithmic law, suggesting a slow relaxation, based on percolation theory, for the chemically shaped fibers. This allowed use of chemical kinetics tools for calculating the values of the activation energy in each case. The evaluated values of activation energy of the relaxation processes for both thermal and chemical shaping were found to be close to each other, in spite of the different methods of shaping.CONCLUSIONThe kinetic analysis suggests that, despite different reaction sequences occurring during the different shaping‐relaxation processes, the rate‐controlling mechanism that manages the recovery process is the same in all cases, and this process is proposed to be the thiol‐disulfide reformation of intra‐protein bonds inside hair.