1. What is hair thickness?
Hair thickness, also known as hair texture, describes the width of a single hair strand. There are three groups of hair thickness — thin, medium, and thick. Hair thickness is largely determined by genes, for example, thick hair are mostly found in East Asians and Native Americans. Caucasians almost always have thin hair, and Africans in general have medium hair. However, there are many factors that can change hair thickness:
- Hair thickness starts to decrease in middle age
- Unbalanced diet, malnutrition can lead to thinner hair
- Environmental influences, such as UV exposure and chemicals also affect hair thickness
Measuring hair thickness is very important to better understand the care and/or styling needs of customers. It can assist in customized treatment programs, product recommendation, and help to build a fuller hair and scalp profile for customers.
To assist diagnosis of hair thickness, up to 5 images can be taken under the XPL light using the Chowis Hair Analyzer. Our algorithm then evaluates the hair thickness for each image and provides the final hair thickness grade which has been proven to match the accuracy of professional devices with 500x magnification.
2. Chowis hair thickness grade
The following Chowis hair thickness grade has been co-developed by Chowis and dermatology experts. To be specific, we measure the hair thickness in millimeters for each image, then we obtain the average hair thickness level 1, 2, or 3 following our 3-point scale shown in Table 1. With the scale, we grade the final result for hair thickness as thin, medium, or thick.
| Grade | Scale | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Fine | 1 (0.017 ~ 0.050mm) |
|
| Medium | 2 (0.051 ~ 0.075mm) |
|
| Coarse | 3 (0.075mm ~) |
|
| Fine |  |  |  |  |
| Medium |  |  |  |  |
| Coarse |  |  |  |  |