This story was originally part of the 2024 Glossy 50 feature. Click here to see all of this year’s honorees.
For consumers, 2024 was the year of the scalp. But for executives like Christine Hall, the work to develop this category for the U.S. market started nearly a decade ago.
“Nine years ago, we said, ‘Eventually, everyone will want to know [about scalp care], so we’re going to put the effort and the money in now’,” said Hall, vp of research and development, hair care, color and innovation at Estée Lauder Companies. “I have to credit the team for being forward-thinking because we wouldn’t be as far as we are if we had started two or three years ago [like much of the industry].”
Partially fueled by the growing attention on the scalp in Asian countries like Korea and Japan, Hall and her team began to develop products for the American market by studying and understanding the scalp, as well as what ingredients help it to thrive.
To do so, ELC entered a research partnership with the University of Bradford, an institution in the U.K. that studies the scalp and hair. Over the past nine years, their collaborative work has been published in prestigious publications including the Journal of Investigative Dermatology and The Journal of Experimental Dermatology. They’ve also presented their findings at 22 conferences.
The learnings have been remarkable, Hall said. It turns out that the scalp is dealing with UV stress, oxidative stress and at least as many other stressors as are impacting the face. A young scalp is soft and pliable, but the scalp gets stiffer and thinner as a person ages.
As the ELC team began to better understand the scalp, and how it behaves, it applied these learnings to the R&D process that Hall oversees. “Until this year, the scalp has been out of sight, out of mind, but now people are realizing that it’s kind of like soil and plants,” Hall told Glossy. “What the plants grow in matters, and what your hair grows in matters.”
Armed with the data, Hall and her team first developed a scalp-focused line for Aveda, a top-selling hair-care brand for ELC. Their goal was to find natural ingredients that strengthen and nourish the scalp and can be scaled for a global consumer.
“It takes a special mindset to work with natural ingredients because they’re finicky,” Hall told Glossy. “I like to tell people that we like natural ingredients because they like to interact with you, but they also like to interact with each other.”
That translates to a bigger challenge when it comes to stacking actives in an INCI list. Extraction methods and ingredient formulations, for example, can change how the ingredients behave.
Years later, Hall, The ELC team and the researchers at the University of Bradford were able to see their work come to fruition through Aveda’s Invati Ultra Advanced Collection. The line was launched this summer with a hero Advanced Revitalizing Scalp Serum selling for $57.
“All of our products take a village, but this one in particular required everyone to contribute a piece of the effort to get it to launch,” Hall said. Of course, the work isn’t done yet: Hall and the team are already applying this science to new formulations. “We are actively in the process of [exploring] how we get to the next innovations.”
