Stand by, everyone. And action!
Hair really is the crowning glory
and it can represent you
in so many different ways.
Hair is the most important thing with your identity.
I think my hair says I'm a bit bohemian.
It's, like, totally free, flouncy, bouncy. It's a bit like me.
And it's also something that you can see - immediately see.
It's like the clothing you're wearing.
You're effectively making a statement.
Each one of us has a unique head of hair,
whether it's straight, curly, frizzy,
long, short, bleached, coloured or natural.
Around 150,000 individual hair strands,
growing approximately one centimetre every month.
Horizon has gathered together a team of scientists and doctors
to investigate this precious material growing out of our heads.
We're entering a world
where science and business operate hand in hand.
The time and effort that we put into our hair
creates a global hair-care market worth a staggering £60 billion.
An estimated £1.5 billion of that is spent on hair-loss treatments.
That's four times the amount that we spend on malaria research.
The growing list of hair-care products
caters to our every possible need and seems to offer the world.
It's actually got an ingredient which can reduce hair growth.
You know, it actually mends things like split ends.
It stops the hair from falling out.
And it also gets rid of frizz.
Today, some of the most popular hair-care products
are sold on the basis that they work scientifically.
But with more and more products
competing with each other to make ever bolder claims,
it's not easy to work out what the scientific evidence actually is.
You know, anything that claims to be free-from,
you should be looking at what else is in their ingredients.
We're going to sort the science from the spin
and untangle some of the most common hair-care myths.
We've gained access to the research laboratories
of some of the world's leading hair-care companies.
We have almost 4,000 scientists across the world
working to develop these new products.
We're investigating the latest cutting-edge technology...
Well, there's only one machine of this type.
We'll test that for 250,000 cycles before we deem it as being OK.
...and we have answers to some of the most essential questions.
Is there absolutely no damage to the hair?
We cannot say zero, never, nothing, nyet.
How much of this information is available to the public?
How much is in the public domain?
As a team, we're going to reveal the latest scientific discoveries
that push the boundaries of our knowledge
of this extraordinary natural material - our hair.
Hair is really important to our looks.
It's our biggest accessory.
Our hair is something we have to wear every single day.
The thing about hair is
it's the one part of you that you get to design.
A lot of people laugh at me or maybe point and say, "Your hair."
And I'll just acknowledge it and move on.
I think a lot of importance is put on hair,
whether we like it or not.
As a busy scientist,
the state of my hair is not always my top priority,
but I like to feel the style I've chosen
reflects some of my personality,
although it doesn't always go to plan.
We've all had them -
days when our hair just doesn't do the right thing.
And when your hair doesn't do what you want it to do,
nothing else seems to go right either.
It can make or break a good day or a bad day.
Good hair - great day.
Bad hair - it's not going to work out as well as I hope it is.
My hair has been very loyal to me all this time.
I've never had problems.
Um, the ones that did, I pulled them out straightaway.
Research carried out at Yale University
concluded that a bad hair day
can negatively affect a person's self-esteem
and social insecurity.
Bad hair days? More make-up day for me.
As a molecular biologist,
I know that what's sitting on top of my head
is just a massive dead protein.
So, why does it have such a big impact on my mood?
One theory is that it's down to the split-second judgements we make
when we meet people for the first time.
Psychologist Graham Hole believes
that these early moments are critical.
It takes as little as 13 milliseconds,
um, to decide whether you find their face
attractive or unattractive.
That's really short. What's that...?
That's faster than you can actually consciously be aware
that you've seen anything.
Graham believes our hair plays a key role
in these unconscious judgements.
What we do know from eye-tracking studies,
for example, is that the external parts of the face
are very important for recognising faces you've only just seen for the first time -
so the hair and the face shape -
whereas the internal part of the face
is important for recognising faces that you know well.
Just a neutral expression.
Graham wants to show me just how influential our hair can be.
Yeah, that looks really good. Yeah? Yeah.
He's recruited pairs of mothers and daughters
willing to swap their hairstyles with each other.
The mothers will get the daughters' hairstyles
and the daughters will get the mothers' hairstyles.
According to Graham, the change of hairstyle
should influence the first impressions
the mothers and daughters make.
OK, so, could all the daughters please go upstairs,
while the mothers have their wigs put on?
We spend millions of pounds on hair-care products,
so hair is obviously very important to us,
but we don't know what kind of role it plays
in the perception of things like age, health, attractiveness and so on.
So, this experiment is trying to see what effect
simply a change of hairstyle will do to a person's face.
The mothers are given wigs
similar to their daughters' younger hairstyles.
Wow!
I... I think I look silly.
I think I look like... somebody from a heavy metal rock band. Male.
And the daughters are styled in wigs
that match their mothers' older styles.
Whoa.
It's just not for me, is it?
I look like a small boy.
Transformations complete,
it's time to see what they think of their new looks.
OK, three, two, one...
Maddie, do you think your mum looks good in that hairstyle?
No.
Actually, I think she looks rather lovely.
She looks a bit dowdy.
It makes you look like you're trying too hard as well.
Yeah. I think, yeah. OK.
The new styles may not have gone down well in our salon,
but the real test is to see how they're perceived by strangers.
OK, we're doing a survey about person perception.
Can I ask you how old you think this woman is to the nearest year?
I'd say about 20. Around 26.
I'd say 21. 37.
- 40. - 55.
52. 57.
When Graham analyses the data, a familiar pattern emerges.
With previous experiments,
we got similar kinds of age differences,
so the daughters' ages were increased by a couple of years
and the mothers' ages were decreased by about four years or so.
Change in the perceived age of our pairs
is particularly marked in one mother.
There was a whopping reduction of about seven years
in the age of one of the mothers,
making her look about seven years younger than she actually was.
Seven years is quite substantial. It's quite a bit, yeah.
How would you explain that?
Presumably, the participants in our study
paid more attention to the hair
and that biased their overall kind of age estimate.
Graham believes the younger hairstyles
send out telling signals.
In our past, it might have been equivalent to a peacock's tail.
It kind of basically says, "Look, I've got so many kind of resources"
"that I can afford to squander them in long tresses."
Um, for our ancestors,
it would have been very useful for them to pay attention to hair
because it would have been an honest signal
to the age of the person concerned.
So, at least in our past,
it's been a good strategy for helping us to decide
whether somebody is worth mating with.
The importance of our hair may have it origins in our evolutionary past,
but it remains a powerful part of our identity in the modern world,
and this deep attachment to our hair is perhaps most apparent
when we're faced with the prospect of its loss.
I think the possibility of losing my hair would be dramatic.
I am very worried - losing my hair.
I think it's a lot worse for a lady than it is for guy.
Post-pregnancy, I lost a lot of hair.
It's quite...
It provokes quite a lot of anxiety.
Whilst I've come to accept it now and it's part of who I am
and now I'm totally fine with it, even looking back,
I see it as being one of my periods of life trauma.
First Response paramedic Joe
noticed the initial signs of hair loss in his early teens.
I've brought some pictures.
I've got one when I'd just started high school,
and one a couple of years after.
When I've just started high school, I must be, what, 11 years old?
And, I mean, I've got a perfectly straight line of hair
across my forehead, but two years later,
I'd lost 50% of that hair in that corner.
And I can personally see now,
back then, it probably didn't bother me as much.
Um, I was thinking about football or chocolate.
As he's got older, Joe's receding hairline has become
an increasingly large part of his life.
I'm always thinking about ways to conceal it.
When it's a windy day,
readdressing my hair to cover the areas I've got
and not make it more noticeable.
Different things affect different people in different ways,
and for me, it's very much my hairline.
This is my issue,
and this is something that has bothered me for 12, 13 years,
so it's something that I'm dealing with.
Joe has already tried a number of off-the-shelf solutions,
but with little success.
I'm a master of disguise.
You know, if I pull my hair back real quick,
you can see that I've probably lost about three inches of hair
in those two corners of it.
I think...
Well, between when I was 13 and 20, anyway.
So, I've been like that for the last 10 years.
He's now decided to take the extreme step
of opting for hair transplant surgery -
a technique that will move hair from the back of his head
to the balding areas.
I'm a bit nervous, but I'm kind of hoping that,
once I've had the surgery done
and once I've had my own hair - the same colour,
the same texture going in the same corners -
that I'll not think about it as much.
It'll be a bit more...
I'll feel better, I'll feel more confident
and, you know, I think, healthier as well.
I'll look a bit healthier, you know, so... fingers crossed.
While Joe's prepared to undergo surgery
to feel happier about his hair,
most of us opt for less dramatic ways to improve our locks -
by splashing out on our favourite products.
I've just bought four bottles of shampoo and conditioner.
It was the best part of £100.
Yeah, I would say about £50 a month.
Well, between £20 and £30 per product,
so quite high-end ones
that you can generally only buy in salons.
I think it's kind of irrelevant for me
'cause I probably spend about 30 quid a year on my hair.
You're probably looking at about £100 to £150 a month.
That's one of the greatest benefits of not having hair -
I spend little to nothing.
As a chemist, I spend my time
formulating and analysing products that we use every day,
and one of the questions I'm often asked
is whether or not an expensive shampoo
cleans your hair any better than a cheap shampoo.
You haven't washed it for seven days? No, I haven't. No.
In order to find out,
I've persuaded my students Katherine and Tania
to stop washing their hair for a week.
It feels quite oily, I must admit.
Does it feel oily to you as well? Yeah, it feels horrible.
The reason there's so much oil
is because the hair produces a natural oil called sebum
that extends through the whole hair shaft.
And, unfortunately, with all the pollutants around
and all the dirt that you might come across,
all of those things are going to stick to your hair.
The job of any shampoo is to get rid of all this dirt,
along with other debris, such as dead skin cells.
The price tag for a standard 250ml bottle of shampoo can vary dramatically.
So, I've chosen to compare three at very different pricepoints.
The first of our shampoos is our cheapest shampoo.
It costs about £1 a bottle.
Our second shampoo - our mid-range product,
which costs about £6 a bottle.
And our final shampoo costs over £40 a bottle.
Despite the differences in price,
they all contain similar cleaning ingredients,
which are known as surfactants.
Now, here we have some surfactant.
This is sodium lauryl sulphate.
It's the most common surfactant used in shampoo.
And what it does is one end of the molecule is hydrophilic -
remains in the water.
The other end is hydrophobic and attaches to the dirt.
So, when you wash away your shampoo,
the surfactant carries the dirt away with the water,
so your hair is left clean.
I want to find out whether the surfactants
in our three differently-priced shampoos
can clean Tania and Katherine's hair to the same standard.
So, we've analysed your hair samples and we have the results here.
So, Katherine, you're first.
Now, these images were taken using a scanning electron microscope,
which has magnified your hair 1,000 or 2,000 times that
that you would normally have.
Now, this is your unwashed hair.
We can clearly see that there's some dirt on the surface.
Now, this next image we have here - this is with the cheap shampoo.
The hair looks much cleaner. It has worked.
It has removed the dirt from your hair.
And then the mid-range product does look clean as well.
And then, finally, through to the expensive shampoo.
Again, it's done a good job of cleaning.
So, all three of these shampoos have cleaned your hair really well.
Tania's unwashed hair was also used
to test the three differently-priced shampoos,
but her results are not so straightforward.
Now, with the cheap shampoo, although it did clean the hair,
what we also found from the digital microscope image -
the surface of your hair became quite static.
You can see here, as soon as you create that static,
then dust is going to stick to your hair.
So, yes, initially, your hair looked clean,
but soon after that,
you would start to pick up dust and dirt from the atmosphere.
Can I wash my hair now?
Yes, you can go and wash your hair now.
The cheap shampoo made Tania's hair more prone
to generating static electricity
because it was missing a key ingredient
that the other two shampoos contained -
a conditioning agent.
Conditioning lies at the heart
of some of our sleekest of locks.
And for some of us,
they are the most important part of our hair-care routine.
My hair is very dry, which is typical for afro hair,
so I choose not to use shampoos at all.
I just use conditioners.
And not only do conditioners make my hair fresh,
they also help to de-tangle.
I'm curious to know how my conditioner can achieve all of that.
I've come to Manchester, home to Lonza,
one of the world's leading producers
of ingredients for hair-care products.
Lonza is a global manufacturer of speciality chemicals and...
Dr Jamie Hawkes is keen to demonstrate
how conditioners transform our hair, using a combing friction tester.
Right, well, this piece of equipment is something that we can use
to demonstrate how a conditioner works.
So, basically, we're going to be taking a hair tress
and both have had shampoo treatments,
but one has had the additional conditioner treatment as well.
So, firstly, we need to just wet this,
realign the fibres...
This tress has no conditioner.
We put this into the machine. Mm-hm.
And then the machine measures the force required
to pull through the hair fibres.
So, we'll be able to see
does the conditioner have an effect on combing?
OK.
So, we simply start the machine and as it starts to move,
you'll notice the comb being pulled through.
There it goes. Yeah. Ouch!
If that was your hair, that would probably hurt.
That would be quite painful, wouldn't it?
Presumably, that's going to cause some breakage to the hair as well.
It will. It will cause a lot of damage.
I mean, if you were to do this multiple times,
you would end up actually collecting
a large pile of fibres on the bottom.
So, that's now finished.
The next hair tress HAS been treated with conditioner.
I think, even though it's going at the same speed, from a distance,
you can just see that it's moving through much more easily.
It is.
And you can see how the hair fibres are actually just being teased apart
as the comb pulls through.
So, there you go.
And the difference in force required to comb the two tresses
looks even more dramatic on the graph.
This is the first tress that we tried.
As you'll see, the amount of force required
as the comb is pulled through the hair tress goes up enormously.
Whereas, if you look at the second line,
which you can only just see at the bottom,
that's the conditioned sample.
So, hardly any force at all. Yes, absolutely.
Unlike shampoos, the key ingredients in conditioners
are designed to stay on the hair to improve its look and feel,
and one is known as a quat.
A quat is a quaternium surfactant,
which means that it is a positively-charged surfactant,
and we call it quat.
Hair, when it's clean, is negatively charged,
which means that this positively-charged quat
sits on the hair with a nice chain
and it is the chain that actually gives the conditioning effect
on the hair fibre.
So, when you have tangled hair and you apply a conditioner to that,
you're actually applying a nice chain around,
so the hair fibres move.
Then, when you rinse your hair through,
the fibres move apart nicely
and then realign to make your hair detangled.
So, when you're choosing your bottle of conditioner
and looking at the ingredients list, what are we looking for?
What are they going to be called?
Well, firstly, we're wanting to find something
that says quaternium or polyquaternium,
or, realistically, anything ending in I-U-M, -ium.
That's always a good way to look at it.
Pretty much every conditioner will have a quat in there.
It's just the presence of it at the top of the ingredients list
indicates that it is there in a higher quantity.
And it's not just conditioners that list their ingredients in this way.
All cosmetic products are required, by EU law,
to show ingredients in order of quantity contained in the bottle.
Checking the ingredients list might be sound advice,
but what do most of us actually do?
I would smell them before I'd purchase them.
You know, if it's a big enough bottle
and I'm in a rush, I'll buy whatever.
Something that'll match my bathroom.
If you look on the back of a bottle of conditioner or a treatment,
what are all those words that are, you know...?
I think, even if I did look at the back of my bottle,
I don't think I'd understand what was in there anyway.
Say, look at this Vitalis cartoon.
Keeps your hair neat the greaseless way.
For decades, hair-care companies
have used marketing shorthand
to explain to the consumer what their products can do...
See the difference yourself.
If your hair squeaks, you may be sure it's clean.
...and science sells.
The first proved medical treatment and pleasant shampoo all in one.
And as you can see,
I think that's really brought this haircut to life.
Really just giving it a nice, natural...
45 minutes to display their best work.
Today, at one of the UK's biggest hair shows,
the marketing tools are very much in evidence.
It's actually scientifically proven to reduce hair growth.
Because the molecules are so fine,
they actually penetrate the hair shaft.
I think there's a lot of science behind any product.
I've just turned 60, so, believe me,
I really want all of these products to work,
but I've got quite a sceptical approach
and the scientist in me wonders if all these claims
might just be a bit misleading.
To find out, I'm meeting Nikki Stopford from Which?,
the largest consumer watchdog company in the UK.
Nikki, along with a panel of experts, has investigated the marketing tricks
used to promote a variety of different shampoos.
We wanted to look at the types of shampoos
that every consumer will see when they're out shopping.
So, we went for popular shampoos that are on the market,
and that were making the types of claims that you would see as a shopper.
One popular claim was the boast
that products were free from particular ingredients.
We saw claims on products
that were saying that they were free from parabens that are...
That's role is to act as a preservative within a product.
But when we looked at the ingredients,
they were being replaced by other preservatives
that are known allergens.
So, you do have a role to play in terms of being inquisitive about the products that you buy.
So, when you pick up bottles of shampoo,
you can see sometimes there's quite a lot of small print,
or there are little asterisks behind ingredients.
Did you look at that?
We did look at that and we saw some claims that would then...
You'd track down, from the asterisk to the small print,
that would then say, "Actually, this claim is only relevant"
"if you're using more than one product within the range."
At its worst,
it required using two products that amounted to £36.
OK, so, in terms of if you are making scientific claims,
how much is the industry regulated in terms of making these claims?
The industry is regulated by,
essentially, the cosmetic regulations.
So, shampoos are a cosmetic. They're classed as a cosmetic.
And it's the responsibility of a manufacturer
to ensure that they adhere to the regulations
and the legal requirements.
And what they must do, as part of that,
is they must make sure that
any product that goes out to market is safe,
and that it also has scientific backing
to support any claims that are made on the product.
While the manufacturers must adhere to cosmetic regulations,
they're under no obligation to make their scientific data public.
It's understandable they have commercial interests to protect,
but I'd like to find out more about the science behind their claims,
and one way to do this is to go direct to the laboratory.
Leading hair-care manufacturer I'Oreal
has opened their doors to Horizon.
As an academic scientist,
I'm used to having my research openly scrutinised by my peers,
and I'm curious to see how the hair-care industry operates.
L'Oreal are really keen on promoting their science credentials
and they've put a lot of money into it.
On their website, they say that,
"Because we obsess about your hair, we obsess about our science."
So, today is going to be a fascinating day
because I've been granted access to their research and innovation lab.
UK scientific director Steve Shiel
is showing me around their Parisian headquarters.
L'Oreal was founded by a chemist.
We invest heavily in science. It's very important to our DNA.
That's why we have almost 4,000 scientists across the world
working to develop these new products.
Steve is keen to show me some of the tests the company uses
to substantiate their claims.
This is our automatic shampooing machine,
and we use this machine to wash hair automatically.
In this research centre alone,
there are over 50 custom-designed machines.
They measure minute changes to hair samples
before and after different products have been applied.
This machine is used to measure the properties of the hair.
So, the sensor will just bend the hair like that
and it will measure the force we need to bend the hair.
This technical analysis forms part of a wider process,
which also includes consumer testing.
The current jewel in their research crown
is a molecule the company developed
in order to combat the problem of hair lacking in volume.
It's designed to penetrate the hair shaft
and thicken from within.
- So, the molecule is in this bit? - Yes.
It took research engineer Valerie Jeanne-Rose and her team
ten years to create a formulation
that built a structure inside the hair.
The small molecules connect together after activation by the water
to form a 3-D network inside the fibre.
Effectively, you're building almost like a scaffolding within the hair
to give it that added rigidity and the volume that we're looking for.
So, it's changing? Yes, it's changing.
And you can see little pieces of glass.
It's quite magic.
This process for transforming liquid into solid
was inspired by the car industry,
which uses a similar technology to repair cracked windscreens.
So, what's the hair like once you've done this to it?
After application of a very concentrated solution...
...very concentrated.
That's very, very rigid.
Um, you can see the difference in terms of rigidity.
This is an extreme version.
What we do in the products is dial it down.
It definitely reinforced it.
I'm curious to know whether
reinforcing the hair shaft in this way can cause damage.
What you don't want to do
is to try and force lots of material into the hair
because then the hair won't be able to withstand that.
Right. And it will cause damage to the hair.
So, it's all about understanding how much you can put in
that's going to have that significant difference
that will give you that change
in the way that your hair feels and behaves,
but without being damaging to the hair.
How much of this information is available to the public?
How much is in the public domain?
We do a lot of publications in terms of novel findings about hair,
and we're very active at participating
in academic conferences,
which really helps us get this science
to a wide number of people.
So, I looked at one of the journal papers
that was published in February,
I think, about the fluxional molecule.
And one of the things that struck me is that,
when I'm teaching my students how to write papers,
it's always that you should publish a critical analysis.
You know, you should discuss the advantages and the disadvantages,
and one thing that struck me very strongly about that paper
was that it only discussed the advantages.
I mean, that particular paper was used
to talk about this particular ingredient
and what it CAN deliver,
in terms of being a new way of delivering this rigidity
and 3-D structure to the hair.
But if they're not in the journal papers
and they're obviously not on the side of the bottles,
where does the consumer find out
about any potential disadvantages of a product?
I think one of the important things with both hair care and skincare
is finding the right product for you.
Some people like one product and not another
and so one of the areas where we're seeing that's very helpful to consumers -
the sort of reviews that you see online -
which gives you a good idea of people like you
and how they've reacted to the same product.
Today's visit was a fascinating insight
into the scale of the operation here.
I'm encouraged by the fact that the company has chosen
to publish some of their work in peer-reviewed journals,
where their data has been scrutinised by other experts in the field.
But for me, there's still room for improvement,
particularly when it comes to a robust discussion
of any potential downsides of their products.
I'm on my way
to the Farjo Hair Institute in Manchester.
It's the morning of Joe's surgery.
Hello. Dr Farjo, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
Surgeon Dr Bessam Farjo
will be performing Joe's six-hour operation -
a procedure that's not available on the NHS.
So, what we're doing today -
we are lowering Joe's hairline
and changing the shape of it a little.
So, Joe has a naturally high forehead
that's receded a little bit.
He's got no history of hair loss at the back.
The clinic performs around six hair transplants a week,
each costing on average £7,000.
So, the first thing I want you to do is to be facing me. Yeah.
For Joe, the first stage is to plan
where his hair follicles will be transplanted.
So, the line I'm drawing is basically the frontal border
of how low we're going to get with Joe's hairline.
Joe suffers from male-pattern hair loss.
With this condition, hair is progressively lost
from the temples and the top of the head.
With female-pattern hair loss,
it's more diffuse - all over the head.
So, we're going to turn you around,
so you can see what I've drawn in the mirror, alright?
So, turn around for me and sit back and have a look.
That's such a massive difference.
I'm really excited.
I can tell you're excited. Definitely.
I'M excited! Nervous.
And, genuinely, that will change a lot for me.
Yeah. And you'll be able to style your hair however you want.
That's it. Comb-over, flat down, no-product day.
After all this, you're going to have a comb-over?
Well, you know, pull it forward and get rid of my hairline! He can do what he likes!
Let me know if you feel any discomfort. OK.
With his new hairline drawn, Joe's given a local anaesthetic
to numb the back of his head
from where the hair follicles will be extracted.
Chin to your chest, please.
There you go. Alright?
Dr Farjo is using a pioneering robotic system
to harvest the hair follicles.
We'll begin, please.
So, the green dot is where it's going to hit next,
the pink one is the one after that,
and the blue is where it's been before,
and it'll never go in there again.
OK.
The robot will extract 2,500 individual hair follicles
from the back of Joe's head.
These are the hairs that we know are most likely to stay
throughout Joe's lifetime.
Hairs at the back of the head will stay
because they won't interact with the male hormone dihydrotestosterone,
or DHT, which is linked to hair loss.
The hair on the top of the head is more likely to fall out
because it DOES interact with this hormone.
That one's down to genetics,
so different family trees will determine
how many of these hairs on your head react to the hormone.
But the general idea is this horseshoe at the back
doesn't get affected.
So, do you know, then, if you look at your own parents -
particularly, perhaps, your father -
would you be able to judge from your paternal line
whether you were likely to go bald?
Not just the father, but the males on the mother's side as well.
There's nothing we can do about the genes we inherit
that may or may not lead to hair loss,
but we do have control over the everyday decisions we make
when it comes to styling our hair -
decisions that CAN have a dramatic impact
on whether or not we cause damage.
I do use heat on my hair when I need to style it.
I do use heat on my hair often.
No, I never use heat.
I never, ever use any heat on my hair.
I think it's really bad.
If I use too much straightener, it's going to damage my hair.
Tongs now have...
You can set different heat settings
and I'll just put it to the top one.
I don't know if I should do that.
Today, the thermal styling industry,
including products such as hair straighteners and curling tongs,
has an estimated global market worth £11 billion.
I've been given access to the UK's leading hair styling company,
GHD's research labs.
Here, heat is big business.
According to Dr Tim Moore, sculpting hair with heat
requires an understanding of its basic chemistry.
Well, here we have lots and lots of different types of human hair
from all around the globe.
So, for example, over here, we have a dyed,
bleached Spanish black hair.
We have what we call white hair -
very, very fine, very, very blond hair.
We have afro hair here. That looks familiar to me.
Indeed! Now, they all look and feel very, very different,
yet the fundamental building blocks
of all of these hair are exactly the same.
These building blocks are strands of the protein keratin,
which are held together by chemical bonds.
Within the hair,
there are two types of bonds that we're very, very interested in.
There are the disulphide bonds and there are the hydrogen bonds.
The disulphide bonds are like the fundamental structure of the hair.
So, they're like the cement in a brick wall.
So, if you imagine, if you take the cement out of a brick wall,
then that brick wall's going to become very weak.
The other bonds are the hydrogen bonds,
and the hydrogen bonds are the ones that we're interested in
'cause they're the ones that allow you to repeatedly style your hair.
They're reversible bonds,
so you can break them and remake them as you see fit.
You can do that thermally, using heat, for example.
Tim wants to show me what happens
when hair is styled using a range of temperatures.
So, what we've done is we've taken some afro hair tresses
and then we've treated them.
One tress, we treated at 185 degrees to straighten it,
and the other one, we treated at 220 degrees to straighten it.
And to each tress, we subjected them to 50 passes,
which is the equivalent to 25 days worth of styling.
OK.
What we're going to show is then what happens
when we put those fibres into water.
If you'd like to start the timer...
So, first of all, we're going to put the one in
that's been treated at 185 degrees Centigrade.
OK. I'm going to put the 220 degrees Centigrade.
So, already in - we're only, what, sort of 10 seconds or so in?
And you can already see, right now, at this time, you can see the 185.
Oh, yeah. Look, that's starting to curl.
Yeah, it's curling back up quite healthily.
It's all gone nice and coily as well,
whereas look at what's happened to 220.
Nothing so far. It's like a dead worm.
So, to get a really good style using heat,
what you really want to do is break the hydrogen bonds,
so these are these reversible bonds.
But you do not want to break the disulphide bonds
'cause you don't want to weaken your hair.
So, you can see the hair that's been treated at 185 degrees
has now reverted back to a very, very coiled form.
And that's because only the hydrogen bonds have been affected.
The disulphide bonds are still intact?
Absolutely. Effectively, the fundamental structure hasn't changed.
Whereas, if you look at 220, you can see there now,
that's curled a very, very small amount.
It's tried its best.
I mean, this is really quite worrying, isn't it?
Because that's now a permanent change. That's correct.
That hair is now permanently altered
and if you wanted it to go back to how it was before, no way.
You can't. You can't.
You'll have to wait for your hair to grow out.
It's not just the shape of hair that can change
when excessive heat is applied.
So, what we've got here is
we've got a nice, lovely, blonde tress here of human hair.
Mm-hm. Then we have two stylers.
One styler is set at 185 degrees Centigrade
and the other is set at 230 degrees Centigrade.
In a moment, we're going to apply our respective stylers to the hair
and we're going to leave it on the hair for 15 seconds.
Three, two, one, go.
15 seconds is the equivalent to using a hair straightener
across a whole head of hair for 30 minutes every day for a week.
Oh, my gosh! Look at that!
There's smoke coming off it. Yeah, yeah.
It absolutely stinks. What is that smell?
Yeah, that really rotten, eggy-type smell -
that's actually hydrogen sulfide,
and that's created by the breaking down of the disulphide bonds,
so it really is the product of you destroying your hair.
OK.
You can see what's happened here. Yeah.
That has completely and utterly changed colour.
Look how brown that's gone. Look at that.
It's completely changed colour. And look where the 185 was.
That's incredible. That's no change at all.
Crucially, these results only hold for dry hair.
Using heat on wet hair dramatically lowers the temperature
at which you can safely style.
So, if you're using a styler directly onto wet hair,
then you're going to be really breaking the disulphide bonds,
sort of almost like little explosions within the hair.
While there are strict safety regulations on products,
there are no legal requirements to limit the maximum temperature
of a styler plate.
The thing is, when you style for the first time,
for example, at 230 degrees,
you first of all run your hair through and you think, "Wow, what a great style."
That's partly because you've melted it there.
Then, as you keep on repeating that process at 230,
over and over again, what gradually happens, of course,
is that the hair will get weaker and weaker,
and that's when you start to see the impact.
So, at 185 degrees, is there absolutely no damage to the hair?
It pretty well much means there is. There's always going to be.
If you're doing anything to your hair,
even, like, towel-drying, believe it or not,
will actually cause damage to your hair.
That's why you shouldn't shake your hair like this. You should squidge it more.
So, you cannot say zero, never, nothing, nyet.
Um, there's always a little bit, but it's very, very small
to the point that you would never, ever really notice it.
GHD clearly invest heavily in scientific research
that helps increase their understanding
of the limits of this extraordinary material.
This is reassuring for any of us using heat on our hair.
But what is disappointing is that,
although this leading hair-care company
has presented research at conferences,
to date, none of it is published in peer-reviewed journals.
I've been quite lucky with grey hair.
Um, I haven't really found one yet.
I've actually got a grey hair.
I've got one, which I quite like,
although it means I'm not really Peter Pan anymore.
It means I'm going to get old.
No, I think, you know, grow old gracefully,
or disgracefully, rather.
Going grey is something that I am fighting.
Men look good when they're grey when they've got a full head of hair,
so I'm quite looking forward to it.
I've found two grey hairs recently in only the last couple of weeks,
and they were plucked out immediately.
Most of us will start to find the odd grey hair on our heads
around the age of 30,
and by the age of 50,
it's not unusual for about 50% of the hairs to be grey.
Whilst many people are happy to embrace the silver look,
just as many will go to great lengths to try to conceal it.
My hairdresser Sandra
is one of tens of thousands across the country
with the skills to cover up the grey.
Well, people want to hold on to their youthful look, really.
They start coming in - they might have just one strand
and they think their world is ending
and they decide that they want to dye their hair.
And this horror of grey makes for big business.
The UK hair colorant industry alone is worth £450 million a year.
Men are just as vain as us women.
A lot of them do opt for, like, highlights
and putting different coloured variations in their hair,
so it looks more natural.
In order to cover up the grey, Sandra needs to make sure
the hair dye penetrates the outer layer of the hair shaft
and deposits the new colour into its core.
This is where the hair's natural pigmentation -
the melanin - is found.
When we go grey, we gradually lose the ability to make this pigment
and hair becomes translucent.
Yes, I'm just covering these slight little grey hairs here
just around the hairline.
Although all of us will go grey eventually,
the properties of afro and Far East Asian hair
may delay substantial greying
by up to 10 years compared to Caucasian hair.
Masking grey with colour is currently the most effective way
of getting rid of the grey.
But according to hair and skin scientist Professor Des Tobin,
we could be on the brink of a revolution.
It's all thanks to an improved understanding
of the traits we inherit.
If you look at your family, you can see a sense
of what's down the tracks for you if you haven't yet greyed,
but there's also evidence from twin studies
that some of the twins that smoke, for example,
and are involved in other lifestyle choices
may grey earlier than their non-smoking twin, for example.
So, there's a mixture of your genetics
and what we call epigenetics
or the influences from the environment
that affect your genes.
Earlier this year, Des and a team of international scientists
announced the discovery of a grey gene.
This was a very big collaborative study
headed by UCL in London,
and these researchers checked the genetic background of 6,500 people.
They photographed them.
They looked at different features of their hair,
and from that kind of chase,
they were able to actually get several very interesting genes -
the first one, associated with hair greying.
This grey gene goes by the catchy name of IRF4
and it helps regulate the production of the pigment melanin.
Now we may be able to look underneath the skin
to see if we can influence how the hair actually is made
before it grows out.
So, now that we have a very specific target to chase,
it should be relatively straightforward
to repair that deficit from the outside in,
rather than having to tweak any genes
or anything much more fundamental.
Are we looking at the next big revolution here in hair care?
It's definitely new.
People thought that greying would be lost
in a whole mixture of ageing consequences
and that we would never be able to find the needle in the haystack.
This appears to be one important needle within that haystack,
so there's going to be an interesting balance
between just how interested companies are to stop hair greying,
if their main business is to cover up grey hair.
I hope that I'm one of those people that embrace it.
Will I embrace grey? No way.
And I won't let any of my clients either.
I think it's great.
I think old age is brilliant, so just embrace it.
I think I'm more likely to lose my hair before it goes grey anyway.
Yeah, I'd love to have grey,
but, yeah, losing it is probably going to be an issue.
Joe's hair transplant operation is in full swing.
While his final hair follicles are being extracted...
...I take the opportunity to meet up with Scott,
who received his hair transplant two years ago.
As you can see, Anne, just round here, you know,
the hairline's really receded back here.
Basically, I had more or less a strip - a very thin strip - there.
So, all this has been built up by hair transplants
and then thickened as well.
So, how do you feel your life has changed?
I don't even think about hair now, which is weird,
'cause when you've got it, you don't.
Do you know what I mean?
So, now I just feel like, you know,
I'm back to the person I was before I had the hair loss.
It's made me feel younger as well.
It's given me that confidence, given me that self-esteem.
So, I've been really positive and happy with the procedure done.
After four hours, Joe is now ready
for the final stage of the transplant.
His follicles have been harvested and carefully sorted into groups
according to the number of strands in each graft.
The graft that has one hair gets put in number-one compartment, then two,
and the number-three compartment has anything three or above.
And the reason for that is because I want to preserve the single hairs
for the hairline, for the front.
They're useful for a natural look, but they're not useful for density.
And then, behind that, you put the two hairs per graft
and then the three and more,
you leave them till you get to the very back,
where they can contribute to density,
but not directly visible.
It's a delicate process that takes Dr Farjo and two of his technicians
nearly two hours to complete.
As his new hairline takes shape, Joe gets a first glimpse.
You hold the mirror. Lift it up. OK. Keep your head where it is.
Yeah. Wow. So, you can see...
There's a lot there, isn't there? There's a lot there already.
So, you can see the little bits with the white tops -
that's where the grafts have gone in.
OK.
The new follicles will take around six to eight months
to grow hair long enough to make a cosmetic difference.
Yeah, it's really cool.
I'm really excited and, you know, you've all changed my life.
And it's something that I won't ever forget, this day.
So, thank you for what you've done. You're welcome.
Honestly, it's...
I'm going to get upset here!
So, yeah, you've made a real difference. Thank you.
Whether we like it or not,
our hair plays a fundamental role in who we are.
I like the fact that I can change it.
So, I can make it look like yours or like yours,
but then I can make it look like mine.
It's the one part of you that you get to design.
The obsession so many of us have with our hair sustains
a multi-billion-pound industry, pushing the scientific boundaries
and creating ever more ingenious solutions
to transform our locks.
So, it's all about understanding how much you can put in,
but without being damaging to the hair.
But there is a limit to how much we can change
what nature has given us.
And more often than not, prevention is better than cure.
If you take your hair temperature too high when you're styling, you will cause significant damage.
Our investigations have shown that understanding the science
behind this incredible material can help you make better choices.
And when deciding what this billion-pound industry
has to offer our hair, it pays to keep asking questions.
Captions by Ericsson Access Services SBS Australia 2017