Conditioning polymers provide multiple benefits

Manufacturers are challenged to create benefit-driven shampoos and conditioners, with the focus shifting to true innovation, and not a basic cleansing product. Hair conditioning ingredients are used for hair manageability. Hair manageability includes taking care of the various material properties of hair. These properties include:

• Frictional properties, which include combing, feel, body, hair breakage.
• Electrostatic properties, such as triboelectric charging or flyaway.
• Visual properties, like hair lustre, shine, and oiliness.
• Wetting properties, which include spreadibility of water and sebum.
• Resistance to surface abrasion, like surface wear and tear of hair.
• Inter-fibre adhesion, which entails hair body and appearance.

With the current fashion trends, many consumers are using double chemical treatments and heated styling appliances, which cause extensive damage to hair and require deep conditioning. In addition, older segments of the population with characteristically dry, brittle and fragile hair also require intense conditioning. Consumers pressed on time prefer to get the conditioning from a shampoo rather than following a complete conditioning and styling regimen. At present there are many conditioning ingredients at a formulator’s disposal, but there is not a perfect conditioning agent that can deliver both exceptional conditioning attributes and show multifunctional benefits. As a result there is an increasing demand for conditioning ingredients that can both be delivered from a shampoo and possess multiple benefits. With stress on multifunctional and multi-benefit ingredients, “the one in more approach” in choosing an ingredient by a formulator is becoming more common. Various factors such as a weakened economy, ease of manufacturing and formulation, and the need to rein in costs are leading to such a shift. Formulators are looking for ingredients that can accomplish more than one function. The multifunctional approach was established from a series of tests using a combination of Merquat 2003PR and Merquat 5210. Merquat 2003PR (polyquaternium-53) is an amphoteric linear terpolymer, made up of acrylic acid, MAPTAC and acrylamide, supplied as a 20% solution in water. Merquat 5210 (polyquaternium-52 and laureth-16) is a cationic crosslinked copolymer, supplied as 40% in laureth-16 wax. Merquat 5210 is preservative free and is made up of N, N-dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate ethyl sulfate quaternary salt (DMAEM-ESQ), dimethyl acrylamide (DMAA) and PEG-dimethacrylate. This combination was found to help in hair conditioning, improve foam in a sulfate-free and sulfated shampoo, improve colour retention properties and provide silicone-like attributes from a shampoo formulation.