Can silicones help to protect scalp health?

Since the 1970s, silicones have been popular components of hair care products, because they reduce tangles and frizz, and minimize damage by providing added protection for the waxy cuticle. They’re also light, and unlike some other haircare products, they leave your hair feeling soft and supple rather than heavy or greasy.

They’re also valued by haircare product formulators, because they’re very efficient at what they do, meaning that only a few percent in a formulation can make all the difference to the performance of the product. And being derived from the abundant mineral silica, we’re not going to run out of silicones any time soon.

Looking after our scalp

However, there’s another aspect of hair care that’s just as important as the hair shaft itself, but that is all too easy to overlook – scalp protection. Embedded in the scalp are hundreds of thousands of microscopic hair follicles, which are cylindrical pore-like structures that surround the bulbous root of the hair and the lowest part of the hair shaft.

We might not often think about our follicles because they’re so small and hidden from view, but they’re important because they generate the hair shaft, at a rate of about 10 mm a month. Therefore, the health of the follicles, and of the scalp in which they’re embedded, is fundamental to having strong, healthy hair in the first place.

The health of follicles – and scalp health in general – depends on various factors, but one of the most important is the level of oxidative stress. This is caused by the build-up of reactive oxygen species, which can directly damage the cellular machinery in the follicles, preventing them from carrying out their hair-building function properly. This damage gradually accumulates over time, ultimately leading to thinner, weaker hair as we get older.

Preventing oxidative stress

Oxidative stress on the scalp can result from influences including UV radiation, chemical pollutants (especially from cigarette smoke), microbial action, and natural oxidative metabolism. But fortunately, there are indications that oxidative stress can be reduced by the action of antioxidant scalp treatments, which opens up the possibility of carrying out scalp protection relatively easily as part of our everyday hair care routine.
The question is, how can such antioxidants be incorporated into existing haircare products? This brings us back to silicones, and the ease with which their chemical structures can be modified by adding side-chain units.

It turns out that taking an existing hindered amine with known antioxidant properties, and appending it to a silicone chain, is a straightforward way of building-in antioxidant activity while retaining the desirable properties of silicones mentioned earlier – and this approach works in practice, too.

Studying the antioxidant properties of amine-modified silicones

We’ve had such amine-modified silicones in our portfolio for quite some while already, but their credentials have been boosted further by a recent study, using cigarette smoke to oxidatively stress hair follicle cells cultured in vitro, and ex vivo skin explants from near the hair line.

The conclusion was that a silicone with a specific hindered-amine side-chain can offer significant benefits in maintaining scalp health, with radical protection factors of 97% for the follicles and up to 100% for the skin explants. This was at the same time as providing high performance in hair care, with protective effects seen against both heat and repeated washing, without development of any yellow discoloration.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen in this post, having healthy hair is not just about looking after the hair shaft itself, but should also involve guarding against damage to the scalp and its hair-producing follicles.

Fortunately, silicones can assist in the challenge of scalp protection, with a specific hindered-amine silicone offering an antioxidant function, at the same time as all the superior benefits of silicones for haircare. That’s good news for anyone who wants to take a more wide-ranging approach to looking after their hair, considering not just the hair shafts themselves but also the follicles that produce them.