(Dept. of Herbal Resources, Professional Graduate School of Oriental Medicine, Wonkwang University)
It is considered to be important to create aesthetically beautiful style through the change of external shape, however for the hair stylists, whose beauty expression is through hair, the role of hair doctor is becoming even more important with focus to improve the hair healthiness. Hair clinic is management of hair and scalp. It is the management process of preventing damages, while improving and cultivating healthy and shiny hair. The current concept in hair management is moving from simple hair styling to emphasis at hair management. As far as hair management is concerned, it usually includes treatment tools such as shampoo, conditioner, hair treatment and scalp scaling system, which is used for diagnosis of hair condition in order to treat the scalp. As the interest of hair healthiness becoming more wide spread, so does the breadth of clinic menu. The wide choice is to fulfill the profound desire of people, whose demands are simply to have variety in their choice. This is resulting in faucets of new value-added and differentiated products. The values that make-up the hair styles consist of mainly design (trend, preference), function(styling, management convenience) and clinic(hair quality improvement, damage repair). Shampoo and conditioner have gone beyond their original function of cleansing to providing combinational functions of treatment, to care and remedy, and advanced massage effectiveness. These are, to name a few that seem to go beyond their original function to satisfy the mental healthiness in people, the King Kong shampoo of shampooings in forward-backward manner, 5-minute shampoo massage that applies sports and relaxation massage, scalp acupunctural message and aural(ear) massage. More and more people are complaining about the damaged hair and hair loss problems due to perms, dyeing and bleaching of hair, in addition to natural scalp and hair damaging factors. Such complaints have stimulated many beauty products and various hair treatment systems being introduced with focus to provide nutrition and prevent damages to scalp and hair. As the living standards improve and the desire of people is to pursue differentiated lives, their demand also increases in hair styling products to fulfill the needs of healthy and aesthetical aspects of their lives.