Sir, I was surprised to see that you saw fit to devote half a page to some rather elementary research on hair condition carried out at a German university (report, Aug 18). It was in the Sixties that my colleagues and I were able to show, using electron microscopy, that the scales on the surface of hair lifted to give a rough surface that lead to static and poor hair condition. Further I found that a lipoprotein produced in the sebaceous gland spread over the surface was a major factor in restoring and maintaining good hair condition. This work, for which I was awarded my doctorate and which was published, helped to explain the action and allowed the improvement of the empirically discovered hair conditioners used at the time.

Similar work on skin was less intellectually (and commercially) satisfying, because whenever we found anything that worked to improve skin, the benefits had already been claimed by ineffective agents. Such is the power of the copywriters!

Alan W. Holmes
Ickham, Kent

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