Presented at the Society of Cosmetic Chemists Annual Scientific Meeting, December 1998

A New Substrate for the Rapid, In Vitro Assessment of Nail Care Products
John P. Sottery, Ph.D. and Jorge H. Jaramillo
IMS Inc., Orange, CT 06477-3622 USA

Formulators around the world are working to deliver superior nail care products to consumers. Their efforts in this area would be greatly accelerated by the development of fast, reliable, in vitro methods to assess the performance of both nail enamels and nail polish removers. In the past, the development of these methods has been limited by the lack of a suitable substrate.

The goal of this research is to develop reliable in vitro nail methods that are predictive of the consumer perceived benefits. Our approach involves two phases: (1) the development of a reproducible, synthetic nail substrate that exhibits the wetting properties, thickness and flexibility of human nails, and (2) the development and validation of new in vitro methods based on this substrate. In this paper, we present preliminary results on a new synthetic nail substrate, as well as a new in vitro method to evaluate the durability of nail enamels.