From Mashable

How ghd’s innovative R&D department is setting the bar for hair styling tech

You probably weren’t expecting your hair styler to have three sensors that monitor temperature, and a specially-designed handle that ensures you don’t damage your hair by applying too much pressure.

At ghd, whose tri-zone technology does just that, science and technology are as integral to attaining perfectly-styled hair as a great hairdresser is.

That’s why ghd’s team of scientists, engineers and innovators work together in Cambridge, one of the UK’s premier innovation hubs, to create the next generation of hair stylers that arm hairdressers with the perfect tools to craft great hair.

To get a closer look at how ghd specially engineers hair stylers, we sat down with Dr. Tim Moore, the company’s CTO, to talk about how ghd uses a scientific approach to hair styling, how it uses robotics for testing, the company’s innovative platinum styler and how technology will play an even larger role in ghd’s future.

THE BACKGROUND
Mashable: Let’s start with why the R&D lab is located in Cambridge — why there instead of London?

Moore: Well, Cambridge in the UK is the technical center of the UK, arguably Europe actually; in the UK it’s always been between Cambridge and Oxford. Cambridge at the moment is rapidly expanding very, very quickly. There’s somewhere around 45,000 high-quality scientists and engineers in this region alone, which is a big number for the UK. There are between five and 10,000 high tech businesses and that varies from the very large companies like ARM, to the guys who do microprocessors for Apple products all the way through very small startup companies who are solving problems with milk yields in cows, or helping try to solve the drought problem in California.

You’ve got this massive mix of these fantastic companies, so you’ve got a huge amount of creativity — you’ve got these very very highly skilled engineers and so because of that we’re a top end brand. What we’re going to be doing is absolutely breakthrough in hair care, so I wanted to get ahold of the best possible people that I could find in Europe. So that’s the reason we put ourselves in Cambridge. The nickname for this region by the way is Silicon Fen and ‘Fen’ is a very flat piece of land used for drainage in the old days.
Mashable: What sort of talent do you hire for your R&D lab?

Moore: So in terms of the people we’ve been hiring, there’s quite an interesting variety. We have industrial designers, and their role is to create iconic products through translation of user insights and needs, understanding of ergonomics and technology embodied in the brand values of the company. We have scientists, so these are PhDs usually in the physics science. We’ve got software engineers, so these are the guys who work and write the software that sits within our latest hair stylers. We’ve got mechanical engineers, so those are the people who do the mechanics, the plastics, the CAD and all that kind of stuff. And there are electronics engineers who design the electronics that sit around it. That then moves into the quality engineers who are really responsible for doing all the quality testing and analysis.

We hire people who are passionate about the whole brand, not just our products or the specialism they work in. This in turn creates a great team ethic, which results in these great products!

THE SCIENCE
Most stylists don’t know that the optimal temperature for thermal styling is 185 degrees centigrade, so your hair goes above the glass transition phase, but not high as to actually cause damage.

The glass transition phase means the temperature at which a material goes from a hard or brittle state to a malleable or plastic state — so in hair styling, this is the temperature at which your hair can be styled, without damage. The ghd platinum™ straightener was designed with this in mind.

In general, there are two different types of hair damage. The first is cuticle stripping — if you look near the scalp you’ll find virgin hair that’s very nice looking, but the further down the strand you go, bits of cuticle will have gone missing. That’s why hair often looks thinner, duller and more brittle at the bottom.

The second type of hair damage is melting your hair. “People who use their hair stylers at anything above 210 degrees centigrade or anything between 410 up to 450 fahrenheit are melting their hair. The cortex is completely gone, it’s literally melted out. So if you’ve got a dial on your styler, do not turn it up to the highest heat! Anything above 210 could cause serious damage to your hair,” says Dr. Tim Moore.

THE TESTING
Now comes the testing portion. Once the science of hair has been factored into the products’ design, ghd works tirelessly to ensure the resulting products are not only top of the line, but that they’re also going to last.

Robot testing hair straighteners
This robot picks up and drops the hair straightener 10,000 times in 20 hours in order to test how a straightener would respond when dropped multiple times over the course of its usage.
Hair straightener longevity testing
They turn the styler on, let it heat up and leave it at temperature (185°C) for three minutes. It is then switched off and actively cooled by the fan. This process then repeats. This allows ghd to test two years worth of turning on and off in seven days. The whole process is automated and runs 24 hours per day, 7 days per week – they never stop. They also measure the temperature of the tri-zones to make sure that they are operating at the correct temperature throughout the process. So far, platinum has been through 650,000 hours of testing and 1.5m cycles in total – a number which is growing, because they test samples from each batch they manufacture to ensure the product is of the highest quality.

Testing the swivel on curling irons
This machine tests the swivel functionality on the ends of the curling irons. This curling iron in particular has been rotating for over six months straight.

Mapping heat and airflow in hairdryers
This apparatus will help ghd create a full 3D picture of the airflow from a dryer as well as the temperature of each point. This enables them to design products with an even airflow and temperature –- critical for getting a long lasting style.

This tests the strength and longevity of the cable grommet – to ensure that through use the cable does not fail where it enters the hair dryer. This product tests the quality of the cable by replicating the movement of hair stylist drying hair.

After all of this rigorous testing, ghd has come out with platinum, the ‘no compromise hair styler’ that lets people style their hair exactly how they want, without compromising the health of their hair.

Dr. Tim Moore told Mashable that one of the most revolutionary and innovative features of the ghd platinum styler is its tri-zone® technology. “The technology uses three sensors in each plate, ensuring the optimum temperature for styling hair is consistently maintained across the entire plate during styling,” he said. “The sensors mean there’s no sudden surge or drop in temperature — which is detrimental to hair health and styling results –- delivering safer-for-hair heat at all times, from root to tip.”

Additionally, ghd has worked tirelessly to create a wishbone handle that won’t apply too much pressure when styling, and keeps the plates in perfect alignment — so the heat does all the work.

In a highly competitive market, ghd knows in order to remain a leader in the space they have to keep innovating. That means making it easier, quicker and safer for people to style their hair without causing damage with longer lasting results, more shine and the ability to bring damaged hair back to life in the future. Making sure that people can use their products daily without causing any damage or problems down the line is key to their continued success.

Dr. Tim Moore pointed out the three key area that drives ghd’s innovation:

1. The Market
“The first area that drives innovation is always the market — it’s spotting the unmet needs, and we have to be very, very good at doing that. We’re actually going to build a room in Cambridge that will be like somebody’s bedroom, so we can get consumers in and we’ll be able to video the way they do their styling and we’ll be able to talk to them within a friendly environment. Likewise, we are also planning to build and design an area that will look and feel like a salon, so you won’t realize that you’re actually in a lab with a lot of sophistication behind it. So you get people naturally behaving in their normal environment and that helps us spot needs.

2. Technical Innovation
The second area is technical innovation, so technology advancement. Things such as the latest microprocessor that’s becoming available at a particular price or a particularly small footprint, the latest high-power silicon switching techniques or the latest advancements in printed organic electronics. In our later products we’re using organic electronics to do things.”

The first area that drives innovation is always the market — it’s spotting the unmet needs, and we have to be very very good at doing that.

3. Scientific Understanding
“From identification of an unmet need and identification of a technology change or update, the third one is scientific understanding — so the scientific understanding of hair also generates innovation because you can’t stop learning and understanding how hair behaves under heat or not under heat or how it behaves with moisture, humidity and all of that kind of stuff.

You slowly start to realize, ‘Wow now I understand that hair does this in a highly humid environment, and what I need to stop water from getting into the cortex and therefore we might need to start doing x, y, z — or you might look at thermal styling for bleached, dyed hair. Styling bleached hair is slightly different from the way virgin hair interacts, which has never had a treatment on it, and therefore how do we make sure that our products are tuned to that? Or, do we need to create a special product which really enables lots of volume but doesn’t go flat in a high humid environment in say, Florida?

Those are all some examples, but that’s what drives the scientific understanding, and the third area that drives our innovation. What we’re looking for and where we believe we could get really exciting products is at the crossing point between all these things: products that meet unmet needs, have technical innovations and use scientific understanding. That’s where you get the ping, what we call the spark, and then we’ll develop that into a proposition and take it through our NPD process right away from start to finish — and that’s when it gets really exciting.”

IMAGES:
Most from BETH CROCKATT
GHD PLATINUM™
DR. TIM MOORE

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