Re: What ingredients were tested?
Posted by Catherine Cartwright Jones on July 25, 2000 at 16:47:16:
In Reply to: What ingredients were tested? posted by CD on July 25, 2000 at 15:04:56:
My tests have been comparing bottled lemon juice, vinegar, lime juice,
wine, eucalyptus, clove, coffee, tea, grenadine, camphor spirit ....
and the only things that I saw making a visible difference was the
addition of clove and camphor spirit.
I saw no change in consistency in these, and I used the identical
temperature and time in each.
I don't recall what Jeremy tested.
Under the microscope, I can see that tap water releases dye from henna
powder only 1/4 or 1/5 as efficiently as lemon juice.
An interesting way to test is to use white silk. Silk is Beta Keratin
and skin has Alpha Keratin, so henna stains them very similarly. Silk
is good to test on because there are no variable factors like sweat,
body heat, hormones .. to interfere. I have the Silk test run from
Sirius on the table here ... and you can see how similar hennaes are
when they are equally fresh and identically prepared. Stale, tired
hair hennaes from the Arab grocery store were the poorest stainers and
the best stains were from suppliers who sent the freshest crop
samples.
