Free Sample
The Complete Handbook of Shower Caps
A Practical Reference for Buyers, Sellers, and Service Professionals in the Bath and Body Trade
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: Understanding Shower Caps
A shower cap is a simple object: a sheet of waterproof material, usually plastic, fitted with an elastic edge that holds it over the hair. But this simplicity hides a specific engineering problem that every manufacturer solves slightly differently. The cap must form a barrier between water and hair. It must stay in place under the force of a shower stream without being so tight that it causes discomfort or leaves marks on the skin. It must fit a range of head sizes and hair volumes. And it must do all of this within a cost structure that allows a hotel to provide it for pennies, a salon to retail it for a few dollars, or a consumer to buy a pack of ten from a drugstore.
The core of the cap is the sheet material. The overwhelming majority of disposable caps sold worldwide are made from polyethylene, a thermoplastic polymer that is cheap to produce, easy to extrude into thin films, and impermeable to water. The film is measured in mils, where one mil equals one-thousandth of an inch. A typical low-cost disposable cap might be 0.5 to 0.7 mils thick—about the weight of a dry-cleaning bag. A more robust disposable cap might be 1.0 to 1.5 mils. To put this in perspective, a standard household trash bag is roughly 0.9 to 1.2 mils. The difference of a fraction of a mil is imperceptible to the eye but highly noticeable in performance: a thinner