new thread
Some time ago I asked people to post their favorite marketing lies. I posted mine, which was a television ad for Garnier Fructis Fortifying Shampoo and Cream Conditioner which showed a girl with long hair ripping a piece of handrail off a bar.
Well, now there is a lawsuit about that very ad.
Article on lawsuit against L'Oréal USA
I remember that advert now!!
I didnt realise that it was aired in the US too.
I remember when that ad first came out in Australia last year, I posted a whole thread praising it. I just thought at the time how great it was to see a girl with really long hair in a hair ad.
I guess though in hindsight that it could result in people damaging their, as she does some pretty crazy things in that ad. Anyway, after reading the article, I'm not so sure that those people have a case in Californian law. I mean how can they show that they have sufered any (significant) damage to themselves?
Should be interesting to see if it ever gets reported.
Thanks Victor for posting this.
I think the damages are small for an individual but significant for the class: many people would never have bought the product were it not for the preposterous claims. Although I didn't expect anything different from usual silicone-based products, I bought it myself because of the ad. The product seems to be essentially similar to Pantene ProV or other silicone based products, as I suspected.
Well if someone is even stupid enough to emulate the advertisement and buy the product and put a barbell in their hair to test the strength claims, then they are an idiot.
Loreal better hope that they have the back-up of scientists and lawyers to get them out of this one. I don't believe the claims at all, pure hyperbole. GF is good stuff, i use it, but it would be nice if they stoped exaggerating their "scientific claims" such as this.
But you know what? Hair is stronger than steel. And that girl had a very thick braid, if I recall correctly. I don't think the scenario was so far fetched. A bit of shoddy workmanship could go a long way to making it possible. But it would have had nothing to do with the hair care products.
I find that very, very hard to believe. Maybe i should just take your word for it, considering the credibility of the source :)
Have you ever tried putting any weight on your hair like this?
It might make for a fun(and possibly painful) experiment.
When i think of hair, i think of fragility, not strength. What a paradoxical statement it is.
Don't forget that hair is very thin. It happens that I have some materials that lend themselves to a test. Perhaps I'll conduct one. By the way, I'm speaking here specifically of tensile strength.
Victor
I sure wish that statement was true that hair is Strong as Steel as we would lose less and it would blute all haircutting equipment available to us hehehe
Axel
It seems I must take back what I said. Hair is strong, but not as strong as steel. I must have been thinking of spider silk, which is several times stronger than steel. Of course this depends upon which spider silk, and which steel.
Hi Victor, here is the information I was able to get from web searches. Here is a short list of several substances.
Tensile strength of:
hemp rope >>>>> 80 megapascals
human hair >>>>> 190 megapascals
soft steel >>>>> 220 megapascals
highest strength steel >>>>> up to 1.5 gigapascals
nylon >>>>> 1.0 gigapascals
kevlar >>>>> 2.7 gigapascals
spider silk >>>>> 1.3 gigapascals
These are based on cross sectional area. Based on weight, spider silk is MUCH stronger than steel.
Absalom
They still show this ad occasionally in Sydney.
Trust me it is far fetched! as she gets her loose hair tangled in a door or soemthing, and then after a bit of a tug, she pulls the whole wall out with her hair still attached.
P.S. Maybe it was with facial hair, but I remember seeing a Guiness World Record on TV, where the person used his hair to lift a girl who was helping him with the record.
Or something along these lines.
It is a bit of a paradox.
Hi Victor, I use Garnier Fructis conditioner on my hair. It is a good conditioner, but I have seen little, if any increase in the strength of my hair. I have recently noticed that the mentioned advertisement has disappeared.
Human hair has a tensile strength of 190 megapascals. If those products did as claimed, your hair would attain an unimaginable tensile strength of 950 megapascals. That would put it on a par with nylon or high carbon steel wire.
Absalom
Not only do you have fantastic hair, but you always have so much (and so interesting!) scientific knowledge to impart.
How come you know so much!?
(By the way '!?' is a good thing :-)
I got those figures off of the web, and I looked at more than one source to verify it.
Absalom
But then how do you know that: "My hair strands are about somewhat fine at 70 microns."?
Surely, the web didn't help you determine this?-or maybe it did, I'm completely ignorant on the matter.
(As an aside: how would I go about finding this in regards to my own hair?)
My post was also making a comment on your contributions generally, which are always filled with insight and I suppose solid research, which is the bedrock of any discipline or intellectual pursuit.
I used a microscope to measure the diameter of my hair. From what I have read, the generally accepted tensile strength of an average strand of human head hair is 100 grams. The generally accepted value in megapascals is 190. At 190 megapascals, it would take a pull of 100 grams to break a hair 81 microns in diameter.
Absalom
With those numbers, a whole head of hair can withstand 10 tons of weight in the tensile direction. Amazing :)
That is based on hair strands of 81 microns in diameter, and you have 100,000 of them. My hair strands are about somewhat fine at 70 microns.
Here is a table of tensile strength for hair strands based on diameter and 190 KPa tensile strength.
microns grams
30 13.7
35 18.6
40 24.3
45 30.8
50 38.0
55 46.0
60 54.8
65 64.3
70 74.6
75 85.6
80 97.4
85 109.9
90 123.3
95 137.3
100 152.2
105 167.8
110 184.1
Absalom
I've read somewhere that a person's entire head of hair can hold 2 full grown elephants(or i think it was one). Anyways, that's crazy!
It will be very interesting to see what happens. I wonder if anyone has reported the ad in the UK to the Advertising Standards Authority, whih can demand that ads be withdrawn if they are misleading or offensive.
