Led by a handful of industry innovators with deep pockets for advanced R&D, the hair-care space is on the brink of a philosophical shift around how consumers should care for their hair.
“Over the last two years, consumers are thinking about resilience in literally every way,” Suveen Sahib, CEO and co-founder of hair-care brand K18, told Glossy. “It’s becoming mainstream today for consumers to ask, ‘How do I preserve my biology?’ ‘How do I preserve my skin or my hair and not just try to react to damage?’ That’s a larger mindset and consciousness that’s driving this conversation, and hair has been one of the last things to hit that conversation. Our goal is to accelerate that.”
K18 launched in 2020 with its now-hero product, Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask. By leveraging its biotechnology-powered origin story with viral social media campaigns and professional hairstylists, Sahib and his co-founder and wife, Britta Cox, became near-instant disrupters with a product said to repair hair damage in just four minutes.
K18 experienced hockey-stick growth, reportedly surpassing $300 million in annual revenue, before being acquired by Unilever in 2023 with only six products in its portfolio.
Now that K18 has conquered repair, it’s setting its sights on defining and leading “hair longevity,” a concept borrowed from the rise of wellness. “I believe, fundamentally, that repair will become an expected foundation [of all hair care],” Sahib said. “It’s going to be table stakes, and longevity becomes the next stage of innovation.”
Now backed by Unilever, which reported $57.1 billion in annual revenue for its fiscal 2025, the K18 team is making its first big longevity bet with Monday’s launch of its new Future IQ Hair Longevity Serum.
During its clinical trials, the company found that 70% of study participants had fewer gray hairs after three months of daily use. Users also retained as much as 19,000 more hairs over the 90 days, which is a significant amount given most people shed 100-150 hairs per day.
At a molecular level, the treatment works by regulating cellular activities within the follicle that create inflammation, which then triggers premature shedding, follicle inactivity and reduced pigment, Sahib told Glossy. “The follicle is the second most energy-consuming organ inside the human body outside of the brain,” Sahib said. That means small changes in one’s health, diet, hormones or lifestyle can quickly prevent the follicle from getting what it needs from the body to thrive.
The new serum is the first in a new longevity-focused franchise for K18. It will sell for $120 direct-to-consumer and through Sephora, Amazon and professional salons starting August 5.
“Longevity, while becoming mainstream [today], is also turning a little abstract,” Sahib said. “It was important to focus on a specific dimension of longevity, and that’s why we are focused on premature aging.”
This week’s K18 launch includes all the usual suspects — influencer marketing, a splashy OOH campaign and plenty of social-first educational content — as well as a quiet rollout of several hundred in-salon, professional devices that read and measure a client’s scalp health. They are not unlike those used at hair-loss clinics like Hårklinikken or once-viral Japanese head spas.
“We’re kind of piloting this with select stylists so they can help our communities understand more what’s happening with their scalp, follicle and hair,” Sahib said. “Diagnostics are going to be more and more important to everyone’s [personal health] understanding, and that data, and that science, will lead us into creating better solutions.”
Overall, it’s a big bet on hair longevity, which Sahib endeavors to define and lead, as a new category of disruption in the hair-care space. “It’s been a substantial investment,” Sahib said. “It required the entire might of K18 and also the Unilever R&D [department] to work together.”
Unilever, which reportedly paid around $1 billion for K18 in 2023, is well positioned to lead the burgeoning category. For example, the conglomerate purchased Living Proof back in 2016, another hair-care brand rooted in biotechnology.
“People are realizing that they need to treat their hair like they do their skin, almost as their foundation to their style looking good,” Lauren Fenton, chief marketing officer at Living Proof, told Glossy.
Of course, this isn’t the industry’s first push into hair longevity or the skinification of hair care, two burgeoning trends of last year. But this time feels different, Fenton told Glossy.
“It’s not your trailblazer [consumer] anymore; this [new hair longevity shopper] is just your average consumer at this point,” Fenton said. “People are getting that information [about the science of hair care] more readily and more in-depth than ever before. The access is unlimited, so it’s no longer your absolute beauty junkie [buying and researching]. It’s anybody who literally just wants to buy a dry shampoo or a hair mask.”
Of course, that puts education at the forefront. “Consumers are searching out influencers to tell them about ingredients,” Fenton said. “They’re searching out dermatologists, trichologists [on social]. It’s pretty democratized at this point.”
Living Proof was born in 2005 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is based on biotechnology. The brand entered the scalp-care market in 2019 with its Dry Scalp Treatment and expanded two years later to a full Scalp Care line. Living Proof also has aspirations to lead the hair-longevity category with innovation fueled by Unilever’s backing.
Elsewhere, a crop of indie beauty brands have sprung up to meet the longevity moment. There’s Manuscript, a hair-care brand that launched earlier this year from Nick Burns, a former grooming writer for GQ, NYT, and Esquire, and Ye Jin, a former marketing executive and investor in skin-care brand Eadem.
Manuscript’s first product, Root Water Hair Longevity Serum, launching in Q4, will target hair aging, scalp health, density and graying. “The beauty industry and hair-care market are vast, and there’s enough room for all of us,” Burns wrote in a Substack that was published on July 26 in response to the news of K18’s new serum launch.
Manuscript was selected for Sephora’s Accelerate brand incubator program announced on July 21. It’s joined by several science-first brands for the retailer’s 10th cohort, including BASE-K, a scalp-first hair-care brand rooted in Korean head spa tradition, and MORÉ, a premium, science-backed hair-care ritual built exclusively for textured hair, according to Sephora.
Then there is TMPL8 from founder Shivangi Van Gogh, a Columbia University–trained scientist, former global creative director at Estée Lauder-owned Aveda and salon owner, according to her LinkedIn account. The line will launch in September with a Hair Wellness System for $80 per month.
Further, there is Mblue Labs, a biotechnology-driven consumer health company created at the University of Maryland’s Department of Cellular Biology by CEO and co-founder Jasmin El Kordi. In May, the company launched its Bluelene Hair Density Renewal Serum+, a treatment that targets mitochondrial function, oxidative stress and hair follicle stem cell activation.
“[The future of hair-care] is going to be driven by biology, not by cosmetic sciences, and that’s going to be a fundamental shift,” K18’s Sahib said. “This [serum launch] is not about another product launch. This is fundamentally about how we change the narrative from [treating] cosmetic damage to preventing damage to making our biology more resilient.”
