An article passed through my Twitter stream today from Gizmodo shouting out “Change Your Hair Color By Etching Nano-Patterns Into Each Strand”. It pretty much mirrors a press release from the University of New Mexico claiming “New technology allows hair to reflect almost any color”.
Carbon-copy reporting is pretty much standard these days in science and technology – and this is fine for getting the word out on new research. As long as the source makes sense.
Unfortunately in this case, it doesn’t.
The University of New Mexico press release makes some bold statements. After claiming that a new technology has been invented that enables people to change the color of their hair, it states “Individuals can live with a new hair color or simply wash it out”. To hammer the message home, there’s an impressive photo of a woman changing her hair to bright magenta, all with the aid of a flatiron.
Sadly, the headlines, the story and the photo are all science fiction, based on an audacious piece of hyperbole.
The research this press release is based on is a new paper in the Journal of Cosmetics, Dermatological Sciences and Applications by Khawar Abbas and colleagues. Under the title “Nano-Patterning of Diffraction Gratings on Human Hair for Cosmetic Purposes” the authors describe experiments in etching diffraction gratings onto single human hairs.
Using a technique called Focused Ion Beam Milling, the authors etched fine diffraction gratings onto small sections of individual hairs. These were engineered to reflect specific colors when illuminated with visible light.
Because hair doesn’t conduct electricity, the hairs to be etched needed to be coated with a fine layer of carbon first – probably from a vacuum carbon evaporator. From the paper, the lengths the etched sections of hair were around 100 µm long and 100 µm wide. These etched areas did show preferential reflection of specific wavelengths of light under the optical microscope.
In other words, the published paper that accompanies the press release describes the use of a multi-million dollar instrument to create a light-reflecting pattern on less than 0.01% the of the surface of a single hair – and that was after placing the hair in a vacuum and coating it with carbon.
To pattern a full head of hair, this procedure would have to occur over three hundred million times. Assuming that each pattern takes 30 seconds to create (I’m guessing here, but it’s not likely to be much less than this, and could be a lot longer), a hair color change using Ion Beam Milling would take around 300 years. Not to mention that you’d have to have your head stuck in a high vacuum machine while being bombarded by gallium ions for all this time.
A bit of a stretch from this to Gizmodo’s “Change Your Hair Color By Etching Nano-Patterns Into Each Strand”. And an even further stretch to the photo accompanying the press release – which the release neglects to mention is a mock-up.
University of New Mexico caption: New research suggests individuals can alter their hair color and use a flatiron to press a new hair pattern. The image is a mockup of a technology which does not yet exist.
To be fair, the press release does acknowledge that “etching hair strands on a million dollar machine isn’t practical for anyone”, although the original paper does conclude “By use of this technique complex patterns could be easily created on human hair to artificially color the hair.”
By no stretch of the imagination does the research published in the Journal of Cosmetics, Dermatological Sciences and Applications indicate plausible cosmetic uses of this technology. This is hype, pure and simple – hype that was generated by the original paper, amplified by the University of New Mexico, and broadcast by churnalism.
So what? No-one’s likely to be signing up for Ion Bean Etched hair any time soon after all. But the underlying attitude that research can be spun into fantasy for publicity – with no guides to where reality ends – raises serious issues. How can readers – and writers for that matter – trust the scientific community when they engage in such cynical spinning?
Going back to the University of New Mexico press release, there is an additional twist. The press release speculates about how diffraction patterns could be etched into the surfaces of a flatiron, which could then “crimp” them into someone’s hair – a quick way to change your coloring without the use of hair dyes. Or even better, you could coat your hair in a polymer that the pattern was embossed into, allowing it to be washed out.
This is the “new technology” in the press release title, and the new technology that coverage like Gizmodo’s confused with the Ion Beam Milling.
This technology is actually described in a patent filed by Bruce Lamartine in 2011 (Bruce is an author on the hair etching paper). The patent outlines a technique for embossing hairs with diffraction patterns, and describes how this might be achieved.
But there is no clear evidence presented that this technique will work. And in reality it isn’t likely to, as effective diffraction grating embossing would depend on being able to imprint each hair individually with the flatiron – all the way around, and at nanometer precision. This is an incredibly tall order, and one that is a long, long way from current technological capabilities.
As a final irony, one of the diffraction gratings etched into the single human hair by Abbas et al. was a hyperbola – perhaps foreshadowing the hyperbole to follow.