Manicure is a lengthy and costly care most women have to repeat on a regular basis. Nail polish consumers are on the lookout for products that stay intact and shiny for a long time. Brands use claims such as chip-proof, chip-resistant, and long-lasting; nail hardener is marketed as a way of improving the polish’s resistance and durability.

Although it is a major claim in the nail polish industry, product’s resistance is usually assessed subjectively, through consumers testing, questionnaires, and visual observation. This approach is not accurate enough, nor reproducible enough, to precisely compare formulas.

The C-Cube Clinical Research system is a highly versatile imaging instrument for skin, hair and nail observation. It has a wide range of applications from L*a*b* color measurement on the hair, to skin roughness evaluation or melanin quantification. One of the many uses of the C-Cube is the standardized observation and analysis of polished nails.

Thanks to its 16mm x 12mm field of view, the C-Cube camera fits most nails, and it can capture standardized images with stable colors, magnification, sharpness and overall aspect. It takes less than 2 seconds to acquire the image of a single nail. Taking 10 pictures, on each finger of a given volunteer takes no more than a minute.

If the nail is painted with nail polish then it is possible, and quite easy, to evaluate various criteria:

– Surface area: The C-Cube software provides drawing tools to manually outline the polish. The surface area is automatically measured. Over time, the nail polish is going to chip and deteriorate and the measured surface area will decrease accordingly. By measuring either the time it takes for the surface to decrease by X% or the amount of polish left after X days, you can express the resistance with an objective, accurate and reproducible criterion.

– Color change: It’s important that the polish remain bright and colorful after several days, but some external factors (e.g. smoking) may alter its aspect or colors. C-Cube Clinical Research images show accurate and calibrated colors. If the product’s color changes over time, then you will be able to detect and measure the color difference (ΔE).

Several C-Cube users are already measuring nail polish resistance this way, with satisfactory results. It takes little to no training time to get there, but considering the amount of data produced in these studies, it may seem like a lot of work to outline each nail yourself. That is why we suggest you may entrust Pixience Cloud with the analysis.

With Pixience Cloud, you get the best possible quality analysis at a fixed, attractive, per-image cost. We use state of the art computer vision and AI algorithms, that we adapt and customize to your particular data. Therefore, no matter what color or coating your polish has, Pixience Cloud will produce automatic, accurate and reproducible segmentation of the remaining polish surface area.

Read the complete article: ZOOM#17 -Testing trends nails evaluation – in vitro efficacy testing – Skinobs.web

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