Are Salt-Water Pools Safe For Your Hair? Alan Wong St George's School Floor Location: J5H

The purpose of this project was to see whether salt-water pools weakened the strength of hair. Chlorine has commonly been used to clean swimming pools, and has been known to weaken hair. Because of this, many pools have been switching over to alternatives such as UV lighting, and salt-water.

Salt-water pools also clean water using chlorine. The major difference is that salt-water pools use electrolysis to extract the chlorine from salt. The benefits of using electrolysis is that it removes all chloramines, a by-product during the cleaning process, that cause the typical side-effects when chlorine is used to clean the pool. These side-effects include smell, itchy skin, and eye irritation. However, it is not known whether salt-water pools still retains the side-effect of weakening hair.

The experiment comprised of hair soaked in water from a salt-water pool. These were compared to the control group, which consisted of the same hair soaked in tap water. Hair samples were collected from a hair salon, and they mostly came from Asian females. The control group hairs were soaked in tap water in effort to make sure that the results were not due to the hair losing its moisture. For testing, the hairs were suspended from a stand, and weights were added to see how much weight the hairs could sustain. The experiment extended over a period of two weeks, with five days of testing throughout.

The conclusion of the experiment was that the hair soaked in the swimming pool water had no significant difference or drop in strength compared to the control group hair. Since the number of samples used was small, and they were mainly from the same gender and race, further experimentation with a broader spectrum of samples is suggested to obtain clearer results.