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Hair conditioner

Hair conditioners are widely known and used to impart desirable attributes to human hair. Hair conditioners improve sensibly the aspect and the physical form of the hair treated with them. For example, hair treated with conditioners is noticeably smoother and softer to the touch. Additionally, hair conditioners render the hair more rinsable and impart a greater ease of detangling and greater manageability to combing, brushing, and styling. Conditioned hair is easily untangled and combed through after shampooing, lays orderly when dry and provides a favorable feeling to the touch. The conditioning action on hair, particularly by cationic conditioning agents, is believed to be caused by the attraction of the positively charged agent to the negative sites on hair protein resulting in the deposition of the agent onto the hair fiber. After washing hair and during the subsequent management of the dry hair, the combing and brushing forces produce friction resulting in the accumulation on the hair's surface of immobile electrons or ions of the same charge. The hair is commonly referred to as containing static charge and displays the phenomenon of "fly-away". Such hair is unruly, will not lay flat and is considered generally unmanageable. Cationic surfactants are those in which the surfactant activity resides in the positively charged cation portion of the molecule. The cationic surfactants are therefore attracted to the negatively charged hair surface and, because of their relatively low solubility and high molecular weight, are thermodynamically driven to leave the aqueous environment of the shampoo and deposit on the hair. These characteristics make cationic surfactants such as quaternary ammonium compounds particularly suited to the treatment of human hair. Thus, many hair conditioning products are based on quaternary ammonium compounds. Hair conditioners designed to improve the combability of the hair typically contain a cationic composition as the active conditioning ingredient or ingredients that is designed to reduce static as well as generally condition; fatty alcohols, waxes, or resins to provide a thick cream vehicle for the active ingredients; proteins; humectants; and various perfunes and preservatives. These ingredients are typically combined either with a hydrophilic emulsifier to produce an oil-in-water emulsion or with a suspending agent or a thickener. Most hair conditioning compositions are applied to the hair when wet, usually as an after-treatment following shampooing. More recently, two-in-one conditioning shampoos have been developed which provide cleansing and conditioning of the hair with a single composition.

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