In September, a federal court entered a permanent injunction barring a private label manufacturer from infringing on Procter & Gamble's Crest Whitestrips intellectual property rights. Days later, news broke that P&G’s Gillette unit was filing suit against one of its biggest competitors in razors.

In the latter case, filed in the Southern District of New York, P&G contends Edgewell’s 3-bladed private label razors were infringing on its patents; it is a claim that Edgewell disputes.

These are just two recent reminders of how protective the largest player in the US personal care space is when it comes to its intellectual property.

And it all starts at the US Patent & Trademark Office in Alexandria, VA.

So what has the company been up to lately? P&G’s recently-awarded personal care patents shows the firm has earned protections for everything from packaging to personal care compositions to computer-based systems. Here’s a look at just a few.

In hair care, P&G has patented a method for increasing hair shaft diameter with a composition (not a hair dye) that is comprised of chlorinated resorcinol and a rheology modifier. The chlorinated resorcinol increases hair shaft diameter, according to US Patent No. 9,402,792 B2. In addition, US Patent No. 9,415,000 B2 relates to a P&G hair straightening method that entails applying to the hair a composition that comprises a reducing sugar selected from the group consisting of arabinose, ribose and mixtures thereof; a buffering agent selected from the group consisting of glycine/sodium hydroxide, sodium carbonate/sodium hydrogen carbonate, sodium tetraborate/sodium hydroxide, sodium bicarbonate/sodium hydroxide, ammonium chloride/ammonia, and mixtures thereof and a cosmetically-acceptable carrier. The method continues with drying and mechanically straightening the hair with an appliance at a temperature between 100-280°C. The composition, which has a pH between 6 to about 10, is free of formaldehyde, methylene glycol, a ceramide compound, an alphahydroxy acid, thioglycolate, a thiolactate compound, a bisulfate compound, clay, a reducing agent, 1,3,5-trioxane, paraformaldehyde, a quaternary ammonium compound and a surfactant. 

On the skin care front, US Patent 9,434,993 B2 covers a system for identifying connections between a cosmetic agent and at least one gene associated with a skin aging condition. The P&G system includes a computer readable medium having stored thereon a plurality of instances and a skin aging gene expression signature. Each instance comprises an ordered list of identifiers representing a plurality of differentially expressed genes generated as a result of contact between the cosmetic agent and a human fibroblast cell or a human keratinocyte cell, according to the patent literature. The computing device includes computer-readable instructions for accessing the plurality of instances and the skin aging gene expression signature stored on the computer readable medium, comparing each of the instances to the skin aging gene expression signature, and assigning a connectivity score to each of the instances based on the comparison.

P&G has also been awarded a patent covering a method of altering the sensory perception of burning, irritation or pain from exposure to an oral care composition. US Patent 9,427,415 B2 entails incorporating a compound that modulates TRPA1V1 activity into an oral care composition. The compound, (trans,trans-2,4-undecadien-1-al) is present in an amount effective to reduce the activation of TRPA1V1 relative to the activation of at least one of TRPA1 or TRPV1.