On 14/11/2010 06:06 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> And it /really/ irritates me when they pretend to be all scientific.

"New Pantene with amino-peptide serum *nourishes* hair from root to tip."

Well, what a lot of sciency-sounding words. It must be science! Right? 
Right???

1. "serum" refers to a component of blood, or more generally any clear 
bodily fluid. I would be very surprised if hair conditioner contains any 
such thing.

2. "amino" refers presumably to the amino acids, the building blocks of 
life. Quite why these would be useful for making your hair look nice is 
entirely unclear.

3. "peptide" is a short chain of amino acids. In other words, a 
mini-protein. (Actually the distinction between a protein and a peptide 
is somewhat arbitrary.) Again, it is not clear why this is useful.

4. Hair is provably dead. You cannot "nourish" something that isn't 
alive. (Although people do sometimes speak of shoe polish "nourishing" 
the leather and keeping it supple.)

In short, all the sciency words are really there just to make it sound 
more impressive. Since you don't actually /eat/ hair conditioner, the 
manufacturers are not required to state what is actually in this stuff. 
I highly doubt it contains anything as expensive as amino acids or 
peptide chains. And if it did, I'm not sure what useful purpose that 
would actually serve.

I especially like the advert for the shampoo enriched with vitamin-D (I 
think) which promotes healthy hair. And then one of the chemists pointed 
out that /actually/ it's there to make the shampoo emulsify nicely. They 
just use a vitamin because it's naturally occurring and hence easy to 
get hold of. ;-)

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