ABSTRACT
The authors developed and qualified an automated routine screening tool to quantify hair shine. This tool is able to separately record individual properties of hair shine such as specular reflection and multiple reflection, as well as additional features such as sparkle, parallelism of hair fibers, and hair color, which strongly affect the subjective ranking by individual readers. A side-by-side comparison of different hair care and styling products with regard to hair shine using the automated screening tool in parallel with standard panel assessment showed that the automated system provides an almost identical ranking and the same statistical significances as the panel assessment. Provided stringent stratification of hair fibers for color and parallelism, the automated tool competes favorably with panel assessments of hair shine. In this case, data generated with the opsira Shine-Box are clearly superior over data generated by panel assessment in terms of reliability and repeatability, workload and time consumption, and sensitivity and specificity to detect differences after shampoo, conditioner, and leave-in treatment. The automated tool is therefore well suited to replace standard panel assessments in claim support, at least as a screening tool. A further advantage of the automated system over panel assessments is the fact that absolute numeric values are generated for a given hair care product, whereas panel assessments can only give rankings of a series of hair care products included in the same study. Thus, the absolute numeric data generated with the automated system allow comparison of hair care products between studies or at different time points after treatment.
