new thread
Hello all! Been a while since I stopped by.
I've been thinking of getting this leave-in conditioner product shown here:
http://www.drugstore.com/products/prod.asp?pid=158104&catid=97814
Anyway, one of it's warnings says "hair burns, keep away from flames." Being someone who is in a college environment and therefore around flames a fair amount of the time, whether it be campfires, people smoking, or any number of other things, I have a few questions for anyone who may know:
A) Is hair more likely to flame from all hair care products, or is it more true of the ethnic hair brands?
B) Would it just be dangerous while the product is not yet dry, or for the entire time it is in your hair?
C) And finally, isn't hair flammable in the first place, whether or not there's product in it?
Thanks for the help! I hope it will be okay to get as this looks to be pretty promising.
Hey Sid, I think the oil and alcohol are the culprits for generating that flammable warning. Basically with that stuff on your hair is a wick coated in fuel. Hair alone burns pretty fast so the danger with this stuff would be a longer and presumably hotter burn. Still, the risk is relatively low. You'd have to have fire come pretty close and there wouldn't be so much gunk in your hair that you would burn long. I'd think you would have the same risk of anyone that oils their hair and less than someone dripping with an oil treatment. It is not like you'd be exuding some flammable cloud twenty feet in every direction and flaring up every time you pass a smoker. With such a vague warning it could leave you wondering that though.
Elizabeth
Shea Butter
Shea Butter
Shea Butter
Not being a chemist myself (but being around chemists at work), I would suspect that the product most likely could burn (but poorly) on it's own and would ignite fairly easily in the presence of flame. The Propylene Glycol acts as a solvent, allowing the product to be thin enough to be distributed through the hair and then evaporates, greatly reducing the risk.
"Of course" it all depends on how concentrated the solvent is and the manufacturer certainly doesn't have their exact formulae posted - and as I said, I'm not a chemist so my opinion isn't to be taken as gospel.
hair isnt flammable as such, it just singes
I can confirm this. A few years ago a group of longhairs in San Francisco worked up some kind of newagey "hair ritual" where each man took a hair off his head and put it in a large ashtray. The idea was to all sit in a circle around the resulting hairball and burn it.
It would not burn. Even after squirting lighter fluid on it, it would not burn.
Enough heat will destroy anything, of course, but the question here is whether hair will support combustion. At least for that hairball, it wouldn't. The flames would singe the hair, just like we've all seen with our arm hair, but flames would not jump onto the hairball and begin to consume it from the hair's own chemical energy that was contained within it.
Contrast that with cotton - if a flame establishes itself on something made of cotton the flame will crawl all over the item until it is completely destroyed. With hair that day we found out that did not happen. Once the material that was fueling the flame was removed or consumed, the fire just went out.
This is not to say you shouldn't keep your mane away from flames! The kind of singeing that we've seen with arm hair can wreak havoc on your mane if it is exposed to a flame. What is not likely to happen though, is that your head would become an instant fireball.
Needless to say, if your hair is coated with something like fuel oil, YMMV. [g]
Bill
i can't help but wonder what kind of products michael jackson had on his hair during the shooting of that infamous commercial...
I think it depends also on whether it is dry or not.
A few years ago I had my hair set on fire accidentaly by a candle and I had to put the fire out with a blanket. I didn't burn with a flame, it smoldered but it wouldn't go out by itself.
--
A Linux Longhair
A smolder depends on trapped heat between fibers or strands with large surface area. Exposing a smoldering mass to ventilation will either cause the smolder to cool down and go out, or if it is hot enough and the substance will support flame, it will burst into flame. If hair won't support flame, it would probably just go out. But dousing one's mane in water would certainly be the best approach! [g]
Before posting to this thread I attempted to do a bit of research on line. Serious research about fire is about as futile as serious research on sex. There are so many people obsessed with these two subjects that every term that pertains to them brings up an avalanche of pages where people have used the terms metaphorically to express their "excitement". What I learned was that the world is crawling with closet pyromaniacs....
What Google needs is a box to click to filter out metaphors, but filtering out metaphors would probably be as futile as filtering out spam.
Bill