Hair Ethnicity 212 their hair strength is high enough to deter breakage that results from combing, or is relaxed hair better because the straightened conformation decreases combing forces to a point where the weakened relaxed fibers are still strong enough to resist breakage? To determine this, a simple internal experiment was conducted in triplicate where natural and relaxed swatches were combed 100 times each. A standard lubricating hair dress was massaged into the hair to simulate realistic conditions. More experimental specifics are in Figure 8. The first day of combing curly hair resulted in the highest amount of breakage and gradually decreased as the days of combing increased but this was not observed with straight hair. The observed gradual decrease in breakage was due to the loss of curly hair fibers, and thus the smaller hair swatch resulted in less breakage as experiments continued. In addition, non-lubricated relaxed hair had less breakage compared to lubricated natural curly hair. These Figure 7 Combing force profiles for straight and curly hair.