Appeal No. 95-2449
Application 08/011,120
is prior art. As seen from claim 15, the claimed improvement is the provision of a
substantially hair-care-solution-inert covering associated with each wire stiffener having
a thickness of approximately 1 mil.
The examiner has determined that none of the references relied upon nor
appellant’s admission specifically teach that a malleable wire stiffener used in a
perming mat should be covered with a hair-care-solution-inert covering having a
thickness of approximately 1 mil thick. Rather, the examiner relies upon the disclosure
in Fox at column 3, lines 45-57, that a covering used in combination with a wire
stiffener in a perming mat should have a thickness of about one-half the wire diameter.
See, e.g., page 5 of the Examiner’s Answer. For this teaching to be relevant in
determining the patentability of claim 15 on appeal, the prior art must also teach a
perming mat containing malleable wire stiffeners having a thickness of approximately 2
mils. If the prior art describes such a perming mat, Fox’s teaching concerning the
thickness of the covering of the wires in a perming mat would have suggested covering
a malleable wire in a perming mat with a coating having a thickness of approximately 1
mil.
As succinctly argued in the paragraph bridging pages 1-2 of the Reply Brief, the
prior art does not describe such a perming mat. Rather, the smallest prior art wire
diameter taught on this record to be associated with a perming mat is 14 mils as set
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Last modified: November 3, 2007