Scalp to Split Ends: Hair Care Demystified - Lab 101

I'm t T and I'm Zakiyah and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. Me and you have had a lot of hair adventures together. Yes we have, Okay, okay, so like from cutting our own hair, we both did that. I remember the last time I cut my own hair. I facetimed you and was like, I'm about to cut my hair. Watch. Yes, it looked good. I remember you cut my hair. Oh

You know, we're doing all this stuff just to get healthy hair right, and that feels like a great topic.

Yes, I love that. So let's jump into the recitation. Let's start with what we know. Okay, So we know that the haircare industry has their hands deep down in our pockets. Oh, that's what we know. I know that they're making a lot of money, and it feels like every five to ten business days there's a new product claiming that it's going to revolutionize our lives. And we've never seen anything so good, and my bank account feels it.

I said, you're trying to many things. You're trying too many things. But I think we've also seen hair go through this like scientification process. I don't know if that's really the word I'm looking for, but where we see people understanding that all hair is not created equal and there's different you know, curl types, porosity, texture. So I feel like we know hair is different from one person to the next.

Absolutely, my friend Zakia can literally shave her head in January and have hair down her back by March. Okay, bust out. Okay, this hair does grow back fast, it does. And me, on the other hand, I'm babies in these twelve hairs that I got honey stock. I'm just taking care of my little children here.

No, no, because I've seen the twist out and it's glorious.

Okay, I've seen the washing and go. When you do that too, it has washed and left.

Okay, it's no longer here. Well, what do we want to know aside from what happened to those hairs?

Right? I'm not a biologist, you know, I'm an engineer, So I want to know the biology breakdown of hair, Like what is it made of? People say it's dead cells, but then they're like, cut off your dead ends. I'm like, is it doubly dead?

Like?

How can both these things be true at the same time. I don't know. I think I want to understand, Like I understand the biology, but I want to understand the chemistry of like what are we putting on our hair? What can help it be healthy if it is dead? What should we be thinking about when I'm standing in Alta looking at all the different products Because me, I'm a sucker for design I'm like, what does a bottle look like? Okay, but aesthetics, but I need.

To know functional, what's happening in these bottles and what do I need to have on my hair?

Well. I also want to know more about hair technology and what we should be thinking about when we are using products and how it affects our hair in the long term and our bodies too. Yes, yes, that is such a good point. I think that's a great place for us to jump right into the dissection. Yes, and this is another really special lab for us because we have it with one of our longtime friends, doctor Sicily shilling Ford.

I am doctor Cicely shilling Forward. I'm the Associate vice president of Product Development, Innovation and Regulatory at Amica. We are a global prestige haircare company that makes hair products for all hair types and textures. You can find us sets of Foura on Amazon if you are a cosmetologist at cosmoprof and salon Centric. You can follow me on Instagram at Cicely shilling Ford or on LinkedIn.

I think we want to just set the stage, you know.

I think people are always used in the term healthy here, good here, and they all mean different things. But we want you to walk us through what's actually happening on a healthy scalp, like at the microscopic level, so we can all get on the same page. I think sometimes people think it's too early, it's too dry, it should be slicked down. I'm like, none of that probably has anything to do well, at least not the edge just part with a healthy scalp.

But we'll have you orient us first.

I think, first of all, health can be a little bit subjective, obviously in a lot of ways. So what might feel healthy to someone might not be exactly healthy to somebody else. But I think there's some basic things that like are probably pretty obvious, Like a healthy scalp is a clean scalp.

We can start there.

You know, one that's free of product build up, that's not caked in conditioning agents and oils and.

All that stuff.

A healthy scalp is also going to be a scalp that is balanced. And I know we got some micro biologists up in here. Your scalp has its own microbiome. As both of you probably know, throughout your body, you have different micro environments everywhere, and the scalp is its own unique micro environment, and that means you want certain organisms that are there, and you want certain organisms that are not there, and you want to maintain that balance.

First of all, I hear about here all the time, but nobody's getting into the nitty gritty.

So we have hair follicles all of our scalp, right, And I like to describe the structure of the hair as akin to a scallion. So we've all seen a scallion. There's like a little white bulb at the bottom, there's the little dangly roots hanging off, and then you have like these layers of green, concentric kind of things coming out, and it's the shaft of the hair as well, right, And if when scallions grow, they're under a layer of soil and the bulb is under the layer of soil,

Now, if you've listened to some of our previous episodes, you'll know that stem cells have important properties. They can make more cells like themselves, and they can make different types of seals, and that's called differentiation, So they can go on to be different types of sale, not just the one that they start out as they choose in.

And then you have the inner root sheath, which is like one layer in and that's really what's surrounding kind of the base of the actual hair that's being formed. And at the very bottom of the inner root sheath, it encases the hair bulb. And within the hair bulb you have the dermal papilla. That part is the super important place in the inside the hair bulb. That is basically what's delivering all the nutrients to the growing hair. And that dermal pilla is made up of mesenchymal cells.

So we just talked about stem cells, which can differentiate into lots of different types of cells. Mesenchymal stem cells are limited in that they can only differentiate into a few different types MMM. So they're being investigated for their role in hair regeneration and treatment of hair loss.

That's where all.

The like kind of blood vessels are like flowing all the nutrients in, and that's where the hair starts to form. And the hair honestly is like ninety percent keratin. That's predominantly what's forming inside of the hair follicle. And when you kind of like pluck a hair out, and like you see a little like white stuff at the bottom

That's good. See you remember I had those lemonade brightes T T.

And the little white bulbs were just dangling, okay, And I was like, these are follics, But those weren't follicles.

Those were hair bulbs using the wrong warbles follicle as the whole.

So what's left, So there's some other things happening in the hair follicle. You've got your sebaceous glands. Those are what produced your sebum and you're sweat.

So what is sebum.

It's the specific blend of oils and lipids that form both within the hair and actually on the outside of the hair. So you actually have two classes of lipids in your hair. You have endogenous lipids, these are the ones that go inside the core of the hair, and then you've got your exogynous slippets.

Those are all the oils and.

Fats that actually like coat the outside of the hair and sort of drip down the hair and keep your hair lubricated and moist and shiny. And those are formed in the hair follicle as well. And then you have you have your erector pili muscle, and that's a little muscle that like controlled you know, like when you get startled in your hair stands up. Yeah, that's your like your muscle. There's like a muscle in there, and it like makes the hair stand up.

That hair is really working. And that was all just the follicle, right, keep going sistly. Let's move out of the root and into the shaft.

So now we're on the green part of the scallion as it starts to grow out of the soil. And your hair shaft basically has three layers within the scallion. The innermost layer is called the medulla. And not all hair has this innermost layer. It's not often present if your hair is very thin. Often the thicker hairs have it.

I don't.

Also, not all the hair on your body has this layer. Then the next layer outside the medulla is the cortex, and that's basically like your bundles of keratin that are in all these helical formations, so they're just bundled up nice and strong, and then the outer layer of the

This is making me think of when TT used to make me make hair concoctions in grad school. And I don't know why she's that night. She doesn't understand hair now because she was giving out prescriptions. Hey, I was just I was on YouTube a lot and they was saying put eggs in your hair, put mayonnaise in your hair, put everything in your hair. So I just was dumping my entire fridge into my hair and was telling my friend to do the same thing.

And how did that work out for you?

You know, that's a good question. As I sit here with my six hairs. You know there were there were mistakes made, but we're learning from you.

So but you know, all the aunties still be doing that.

You know, they're mixing and they're kitching their shades and their coconut oils, and you know, to.

Each their own. Sometimes you gotta find what works for you.

When I hear you saying this stuff, like when you mentioned cholestero, I was like, okay, I can think of these things. When I hear you sam rhapnocyites which are making keratin, I'm like, yes, I see all the things that stay with keratin or this has this and ceremonise. I see all of these terms, you know, and it feels.

Like the beauty industry just picks up one puts it down, picks up another puts it down. And I don't know if you feel like this. First, My my grandmother was a hairdresser, Okay, so I was like, I didn't see any of these terms until much much later because it was a hot comb and blue magic.

Grease that I grew up with.

But there's just so much innovation in hair now. I think maybe hair is just getting a lot more weight, so people are looking for ways to.

Do different things. T T. I'm getting ready to bring up something that I told you about, and you were a skeptic. What dry shampoo? Yes? I was like okay. She was like oh, because I was like, oh, my hair is so greasy. Just cut a bob and I was like, I don't want to wash my hair yet, but it's so greasy. And she was like, go pick up the Amika dry shampoo. I was like, dry shampoo is not for us, It's for someone else. She said no,

All dry shampoos are a mixture of starches or some sort of absorbent material. Some of them have silica Mika dry shampoos. We tend to use rice starch, tapioca starch, arrowroot starch. You'll see a few different ones across the collection, and it's one of our number one products. I mean, our dry shampoo, if I may be so bold us to say, is the best.

It is so good.

It is so good, And what you want to achieve with the dry shampoo is essentially the removal of like oil and moisture from the root and from the scalp.

These starches.

If you've ever thickened a soup, you'll know that the starches like to grab onto water and oils and that's how they operate as a thickener, and that's pretty much what's happening in your scalp. You put these absorbent materials on your scalp when it's starting to get oily, or before a workout, or even before you go to bed.

Which is a hack.

And as you start producing oils, it's going to latch onto those oils and you can basically brush them out of your hair, shake them out of your hair so that you don't get a build up of oil on the scalp. And this is beneficial for a lot of reasons, especially for black women who press their hair, this could be a very expensive process.

It can take a long time.

You don't want to be doing this every two days because it's expensive.

You're in the chair for a while.

Also because you're just applying heat to your hair over and over again, which can be damaging to the hair. So dry shampoo can elongate the time between styling your hair, which is overall like a pretty good thing for people who don't want to add heat to their hair every day.

Who really did give us a heck? Okay, now I'm using dry shampoo after I'm like, oh, it's already gotten bad. But when you said before the gym and before ben because the way I'm sweating at the back of my neck needs to be studied. Okay, you talked about those glands, but it's not right back there.

There's also a lot of things that like make dry shampoo specifically special. You know, we want to have the right particle size so it distributes nicely. It's propelled nicely out of a can, so you can really get it all up in your hair. Some starches like can be too gritty, you know, some don't observe enough, so it's just getting that formulation just right, and then you get a nice burst of fragrance.

Yees, Pascal'll say, so.

Your hair smells nice and fresh.

And talking about cleaning your scalp. It really felt like over the last like fifteen or twenty years that now everything says salt fate free. Before then, no one was ever talking about it, and now everything it's like, is it saltfate free. I'm not gonna use it if it's not salt fate free. I feel like salt fate free is like a buzzword right now and has been for a little while. Can you talk about why there was a shift to salt fate free and what that means for washing your hair?

A sulfate is a type of surfactant, and a surfactant is this word is actually a portmanteau, which is a treat.

When I get to use the word portmanteau, it means three academics walk into a room.

Somebody's gonna say port monteau. Okay, somebody port.

So it means surfactant means surface active agent with surfactants. One part of it is water soluble and one part of it is oil soluble. And so when you put a surfactant in water, the oil soluble parts are like I didn't sign up for this, and they just form together into a group into a circle, and they put all their little oily bits in a circle together and kick out all the water, and then the water protects them. It's like it forms a barricade. And this is called

Molecules are diverse.

However, in the cosmetic space and the beauty space, certain molecules tend to just get a bad reputation. You're looking at any ingredient list and you're standing in the row at Target trying to figure out your business. You don't have time to be reading somebody's.

Thesis on solvate.

So right, yeah, you know, it's a little easier for consumer to be like, okay, solfates, I heard the bad I'm not going to buy them and make that decision for them. Doesn't necessarily mean the formula is super stripping. It could actually be if you put one little drop of sulfate in the ocean, it's a sulfated ocean, but it's not going to be a strong shampoo. Hair is also very emotional. You know, the whole experience of styling your hair and it is your hair braking and hair

Yeah, and we want them to be informed like you just informed everybody that's listening to Dope Labs. Basically, if you've been washing your hair and it's not it's still feeling greasy, it's still feeling whatever. Maybe you need more sulfate.

You gotta do what's right for you. Yeah, And sometimes you might really need a deep cleanse. Like it's a hot summer day, you've been at the beach, you have twenty five layers of dry shampoo up and there.

I want to talk about, which I just posted about yesterday. My hairstylist is an Amica Girley, but she was telling me the same way that you talked.

About how the dry shampoo worked. She was telling me about this anti humidity spray. Because I'm in Atlanta and the girls are wearing you know, bust down part in the middle thirty inches. Now, that's okay if that's a quick weave or sewing or something, right, But when it's your hair and you hit that humidity and my cuticle begins to swell as you said, and from point A to point now, when I do it, my hair is poofy. But when she does it and I go out, it

And so she sent me this picture like this is what you need, and it was the Mica anti humidity spray. The shield.

The shield. The shield is so good. She really is that girl. She is shielding your hair from humidity.

So we we actually just launched a new anti frize humidity product.

So how does the shield work?

And so both products they work similarly, but they're different formats for different use cases, but you can also use them together. So the shield essentially has technology in there

No weapon formed against me, no weapon. This is actually the weapon. As soon as as a kid tells me to get something, I get it. And so I am using all those things, and my shield spray is on the web. TT is using a lot of product in general. I use a lot of product in general all the time for everything, and I'm just I really need to dial some of this stuff back.

I think what we've learned is that not every product works for everybody, And so I would love for you to talk a little bit about what you're gonna find working for different people, like porosity, pH texture, Like you just said, like if you have curly hair, you're gonna want more conditioner to reduce that strain that's already inherent

Hair is so complex because when you think about skincare, it's kind of easier to work in product development. Everybody has the same goals clear skin, no dark spots, no wrinkles.

Yeah.

Well, with hair, everybody has different goals and everybody has different starting points, which means there's so many concoctions and things you can do and routines and what you might want your hair to look like on Monday might be different than on Tuesday, and say there'sday Friday. It's always changing.

You might want to serve in different personalities.

Yeah, and that's also kind of the beauty of afrotectured hair because there's so many possibilities you can be so many different people, and it's so versatile. I really like the way that Amika structures our products because they're by

Is it straight? Is it this?

Do I need humidity? What climate do I live? And it's if you all talk about needing the shield and anti frizz as a function of your environment, So you reach for those products that serve those specific needs. So there's no right and wrong product for people. I really think it's based off of what does.

Your hair need?

What are your goals? What do you want to do with your hair? And then the second layer of it is like what is the condition of your hair? And that's going to also help you choose. So I have very thin, fine, very porous hair, and when your hair is porous, that basically means have bigger gaps in your cuticle. That could be one reason. It could also be porous because it's been damaged by bleach or by pollution or by sheets that m Yeah, because we got free radicals

We have a mutual friend Britney. She will put that edge control, that hair will lay down. They'll let jail and swoop. I don't like skin.

Yes, I had a silk press. She put that whatever she was using on her, that jail she was using. My hair curled right up at the root. I was like, too much moisture. I don't know what you did, but now swollen cuticles.

Okay, now I have a problem. Can you talk to us more about like hair technology that you see like coming down the pike, or hair technology that excites you that you want people to know about.

I am really excited about some of the sustainability innovations.

That's what gets me going personally.

I would love to see a lot of the materials that we use in haircare us continuing to find regenerative sources of those materials that are.

Going to continue to be fantastic for the Earth.

Something I came across the other day that was really interesting was a company that's using photosynthesis to create materials. So they have this synthetic photosynthesis process that is a carbon capture process, So you use carbon and water as your feedstocks CO two and water and you're able to create ingredients via photosynthetic mechanisms by using these like bioengineered plants, so you can create a carbon negative ingredient for the

So put wine in your hair. I got it, Okay, So that's not what she's said.

I mean, you can packet with some resveratrol.

You polyphenols protect from those free radicals you know.

Tit and I have seen you go from graduate student who now product development extraordinary in the haircare industry. And I think one of the things we love is for people to understand, like the day to day what you're using around you, there's science all in it, and so I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how you're leveraging some of the science you know in your role.

I love to talk about science, and I do use science all the time. Understanding that hair is a material is very important in my role, and I actually started my career in material science and materials engineering creating surfaces that are super hydrophobic, meaning they can repel water and

You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast dt is on X and Instagram at dr Underscore, t Shoe, and you can find Takiya at Z said so. Dope Labs is a production of Lamanada Media. Our senior supervising producer is Kristin Lapour and our associate producer is Isara Savez. Dope Labs is sound design, edited and mixed by James farber Lamanada Media's Vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is