Elke Weimann
Elke Weimann, BASF Personal Care and Nutrition GmbH, Germany Senior Marketing Expert Personal Care Emerging Markets EMEA
Elke Weimann is located in Düsseldorf, Germany. For more than 30 years she has been working in the Personal Care Industry with Henkel, Cognis and BASF. She is an expert in Strategic and Operative Technical Marketing, and focused on Emerging Markets, including Central Eastern Europe, Turkey, Middle East and Africa.
In her current position as Senior Marketing Expert Personal Care Emerging Markets, she strives to create new business opportunities with finished goods companies. She closely co-operates with teams cross-regionally and cross-functionally in the emerging regions.
Talk Description
Hair Care Market Africa – Trends and Insights
Consumers in sub-Saharan Africa have specific hair care needs and challenges connected closely to the characteristics of their hair, which is typified by tight coils and kinks and fewer cuticle layers than other hair types. The unique characteristics make the natural hair perceptibly more difficult to manage, necessitating tailored regimen to enhance its health and beauty.
To develop hair care solutions, relevant to the local consumer, it is imperative to understand their real needs, and aspirations, and keep updated on local trends.
With its local competence center in formulation design and marketing in Nigeria, BASF strengthened its Personal Care footprint in Africa, to better understand and serve the personal care market demands in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on own market findings, and a recently conducted consumer survey, BASF will talk about trends, consumer concerns and needs in the cosmetic hair care market in sub-Saharan Africa.
Trefor Evans, Ph.D.
Dr. Trefor Evans has worked in the hair care industry for almost 30 years. The first half of his career was spent as a scientist and manager in the product development labs of large consumer good companies. He then served for five years as Director of Measurement Services at TRI-Princeton, where he now holds the titles Director of Research and Institute Fellow. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Cincinnati, a regular Columnist for Cosmetics & Toiletries magazine and Technical Editor for the Journal of Cosmetic Science.
Dr. Evans is highly active in the hair care industry through many working relationships with companies of all shape and size. He is a regular presenter at International Hair Conferences and has been an invited speaker at many technical meetings and symposia. He has been Chairman for the past three iterations of the International Conference on Applied Hair Science.
He has published numerous articles in trade magazines and the scientific literature and is co-author and co-editor of the book “Practical Modern Hair Science”. He holds seven patents in the area of hair care and his research work has been awarded by the Society of Cosmetic Chemists on three separate occasions. Dr Evans regularly teaches and facilitates training classes on the topics of hair science and hair product claims which have been held in the US, Europe and Asia.
Talk Description
Investigating the Physical Properties of Mexican Hair – A Cautionary Tale.
Hair comes in a broad range of sizes shapes and color which can lead to very different appearance and maintenance issues. This leads to a tendency to try and group or classify hair into various pigeon-holes – for example, based on ethnicity. The historical literature contains a number of papers that describe differences in the physical shape of Caucasian, Asian and African hair; and our study initially involved comparing and contrasting the properties of Hispanic hair to this earlier work.
On the one hand, we obtained fiber dimension results for Mexican hair that were statistically differentiated from the aforementioned ethnicities; but, at the same time, the extreme variability of hair becomes apparent. There are huge differences in dimensions amongst individuals of any ethnicity; indeed there are huge differences on the head of a given individual. The presence of statistically significant differences implies dissimilarities; but, in reality, we see how “hair types” can be are far more alike than different. Superimposed on top of this is the things we do to hair – wherein, results will show how very different damage levels were observed within the same ethnic groups in different geographic regions.
Poonam Sewraj
Head of Instrumental and Clinical Research, Claims L’Oréal South Africa
Poonam leads the Instrumental Evaluation team at L’Oréal Research & Innovation within a highly diverse research team. Her role at L’Oréal is to objectively assess product efficacy by assessing instrumentally, correlations between formulation technologies and formulated product performance to assist in development of marketing efficacy claims for skin and hair. The role further involves the identification of appropriate methods and expertise to meet anticipated future product performance requirements as well as anticipate future testing needs for the business.
She has gone through extensive training in Paris, France on a range of industry-leading instrumentation and predictive methodology for in-vivo and in-vitro measurements. Poonam holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree in Microbiology and Biotechnology (Wits) as well as a Diploma in Cosmetic Science (Coschem). Prior to joining L’Oreal, Poonam was employed as a scientist specialising in vaccine clinical trials and has worked with multinational teams, during a short-term assignment, at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, USA.
Talk Description
Understanding the causes of damage in textured hair.
African women have a complex routine; spaced out washdays with manipulation of hair fibers, which could have severe effects on hair and hairline. Grooming practices play a major role in determining the level of hair breakage experienced. Tensile properties of hair with higher curl vary greatly. These hair types have many kinks and twists along the hair shaft resulting in hair with several fragile points, which leads to matting and breakage. Due to its intrinsic morphological properties, natural African hair is susceptible to hair breakage, with some grooming habits further exacerbating the hair loss. Management of natural African hair typically involves braiding, plaiting and combing. Braiding and combing imparts significant damage on the natural African hair fiber. Appropriate education on grooming practices can help women understand safer practices and minimize damage.
Dr Henry Brew
Dr Henry BREW is the CEO and founder of Here2Grow Cosmetics and Homecare Labs and has established a state-of-the-art product development and testing lab facility in Selby, UK.
He is a highly sought-after Beauty & FMCG Product Development Scientist and Formulator; and has developed cutting edge Personal Care Technologies for Unilever, Sun care products for Advance Nanotek and effective hair care products for leading Trichologists in the UK.
Dr Brew has also developed effective high-end Beauty products, specifically designed for the African American and African European market. As a leading product development expert, he is often invited to work globally and has successfully delivered products for the US, Australia, Ghana, South Africa, and UK.
Recently, he was appointed as a Business Advisor board member, to the Kwame N’Krumah University of Science & Technology, Ghana, working alongside the sanitation Minister. He is a regular guest lecturer at the Hull University Business School, where he delivers lectures on entrepreneurship.
Talk Description
Practical formulation technologies for different curl types
One of the many challenges, which formulators are faced with is creating hair care products for different curl types. Specific hair morphologies of hair have distinct needs for health, maintenance, and protection. Moreover, this talk will address and map the specific curl types and the associated shampoo conditioner and hair oil categories. Challenges for the development of curly hair types do not only involve the product development phase but also the scale up process. Dr Henry Brew will be providing great insights and approaches about creating effective and relevant hair care formulations including lab bench and production considerations. The appropriate selection, handling and processing of raw materials for curly hair including the targeted consumer demographics will be discussed.
Crisan Popescu
Crisan received the degree in chemical engineering / textile chemistry from Shanghai Textile Engineering Institute (now Donghua University) / China, and the PhD degree in physical chemistry from the University of Bucharest / Romania.
He worked in wool industry and research, and in academia as professor of textile chemistry. After several short spells at The German Wool Research Institute (now DWI Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials) in Aachen, he joined the Institute and worked in keratin related projects for 15 years. Later, moving to hair care industry as a senior research scientists with Kao Germany GmbH.
Currently, he is working in hair research and as a consultant for hair care industry, and for wool industry.
The papers he publishs cover the areas of his scientific interest, which spans from kinetics of heterogeneous processes to physics of bio-polymers, with a focus on keratin.
Talk Description
Straightening the Hairs. Chemical and Physical Ways.
Hair straightening is one of the cosmetic processes generally known as ‘hair shaping processes’, treatments developed for changing the original shape of the hair. The straightening deals with the fibre morphology that, ultimately, is going to be altered, as it happens also with the chemistry of the fibre.
There are various chemical and / or physical means developed for this process, and their use depends on how long it is required to last the new shape of the fibre.
This presentation surveys several chemical and thermal modalities to straighten the hair and looks into the way the fibre structure is affected and how to evaluate the impairments for possible optimisation of the process, knowing that any such treatment targets the hair fibre stability.
Dr. Matthew Harries, PhD, FRCP
Consultant Dermatologist, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust Honorary Senior Lecturer, The University of Manchester Fellow, The Royal College of Physicians of London
Committee Member, British Hair and Nails Society Steering Committee member, UK-Dermatology Clinical Trials Network
Dr. Matthew Harries is a Consultant Dermatologist and Honorary Senior Lecturer with a specialist interest in hair and scalp disorders, particularly the scarring alopecias. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Manchester for his research into the hair’s immune system in scarring alopecias. He is the British Hair and Nail Society committee member for research and also sits on the UK-Dermatology Clinical Trials Network steering committee. Dr Harries is a consultant dermatologist at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Manchester and consults at ‘Everything Skin Clinic’.
Talk Description
Inflammatory scalp conditions associated with very curly hair and their treatment.
Discussing inflammatory scalp conditions associated with curly hair, focusing on the inflammatory scarring alopecias. Specifically covering central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia, folliculitis decalvans and dissecting cellulitis of the scalp, and discuss the impact of traction alopecia and hair breakage in association with these conditions.
Dr Apostolos Pappas, PhD
Apostolos Pappas PhD, started his professional career as a research biochemist in the Skin Research Center of Johnson & Johnson and later served at Munich Biotech, where he worked on cancer research. Thereafter he returned to Johnson & Johnson, where he focused on lipid metabolism research.
Dr. Pappas is one of the first to culture cells that were previously not cultured; as human primary sebocytes and more recently human facial preadipocytes.
While at J&J he collaborated with many experts and KOLs to open a new field within the academic textbooks arena and curriculums on “Nutrition and Skin”, which was published by Springer in 2011. The success and wide recognition of this project paved the way for his second academic textbook by Springer in 2014: “Lipids and Skin Health”; which is the very first of its kind as well.
He has initiated and chaired three major symposia and has given more than 20 invited lectures at prestigious societies and universities. Recently he became adjunct faculty at the Department of Food Science at Rutgers University (since September 2013) and a member of the Rutgers Center for Lipid Research. He has also been appointed as a member of the scientific advisory board of directors of the CARF Society.
Currently Apostolos is a founder in numerous new ventures and serves as an independent Consultant on lipid metabolism, dry aging skin, acne and skin microbiome.
Talk Description
Skin and scalp microbiome:emerging era for innovation
A vast diversity of microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, mites and ticks, colonize the surface, pores and various organelles of the human skin. Despite the many advances in techniques to characterise our microbiome, the effects of these organisms on skin and scalp health are still not properly understood. We still need to understand the ecology of these unique micro-ecosystems, and how they interface with the skin. In this talk a summary of the studies on skin and scalp microbiome will be discussed.