Coconut oil and mineral oil can strengthen the hair against breakage
Sureka, Priyanka et al. “A Method to Measure Oil Penetration into Hair and Correlation to Tensile Strength.” International Journal of Trichology vol. 14,4 (2022): 128–134
Claim
Coconut oil and mineral oil strengthen the hair to limit breakage.
Data
Sureka et al., found a correlation between hair thickness and tensile strength.
Where Type 3 hair oil increased hair thickness the most, this also correlated with an increase in tensile strength.
Notes
Hygral fatigue
Hygral fatigue seems to suggest hair is damaged when the hair fibre is expanded and shrunk over time or expanded too much. While Sureka et al. note an increase in strength through thickness from oil penetration, their cited literature indicates that the presence of oil limits the swelling of the hair, where too much swelling from moisture is considered to be damaging.
This study also indicated that the swelling of hair is limited by the presence of oil and since coconut oil was able to penetrate the hair fiber it may provide better protection from damage by hygral fatigue
Hair damage
While I’m sure I’m not the only one to see hair breakage while washing, the Rele and Mohile paper showed that loss of protein material is another form of damage where mineral oil was comparatively limited in its effects compared to coconut oil.
So I’d be interested to know how the other elements of Type 3 hair oil would have an effect on protein loss versus mineral oil alone.
Potential Hypothesis
So while there is a correlation between the diameter of the hair and tensile strength, I assume there is a bell-shaped curve where tensile strength reduces again as hair diameter continues to increase.
Questions
What is Type 3 Hair Oil?
At first, I presumed it might have something to do with the Andre Walker Hair Typing System. But I didn’t want to assume.
A Google Search highlighted what seems to be a legal document for the India Government from 1993 which outlined the composition of oil types https://law.resource.org/pub/in/bis/S11/is.7123.1993.pdf.
The reason seems to be to provide official standards regarding their ECO mark for consumers.
It’s constituted of:
77% light liquid paraffin, 21% vegetable oil, and 2% excipients (antioxidants, color, and perfume)
Citation
Sureka, P., Agrawal, T., Majumder, S., & Ritambhara, K. (2022). A Method to Measure Oil Penetration into Hair and Correlation to Tensile Strength. International journal of trichology, 14(4), 128–134. https://doi.org/10.4103/ijt.ijt_122_20
