When Renée Bibby has a good hair day, people stop her on the street and tell her they love her short curly hair. On a bad hair day, though, “I look like a dandelion puff,” said Bibby.
Over the years, Bibby, who is of mixed-race descent and describes her hair as "coarse, but not black", has spent a small fortune trying products to maximise the good days and minimise the bad. Six months ago, she found a winner: a custom-made conditioner from a startup called Prose. (She does not shampoo her hair.)
“The first day I used it, I got out of the shower and the curl was already in my hair,” said Bibby, who used to have to work to bring the curl back. “It’s probably taken 10 minutes off my routine.”
Prose, whose founders include a former L’Oréal vice-president, uses a quiz, artificial intelligence algorithms and a 6,000sq ft production space in Brooklyn, New York, to create what it hopes is each customer’s ideal product.
Hottest spaces
The company has shipped 110,000 bottles and will reach $1 million in monthly sales by its first birthday in January, and it is one of the biggest and most successful entrants in what has fast become one of the hottest spaces in the beauty industry: customisable hair care. On Monday the company announced that it had raised $18 million in new funding.
An in-salon machine that looks like the world's fanciest coffee maker whips up products in 50 seconds
Another startup, the four-year-old Function of Beauty, uses its own quiz and algorithms (along with a Willy Wonka-esque 50,000sq ft factory of custom-built machines). It has sold 1 million bottles, according to Zahir Dossa, a trained computer scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the company’s chief executive.
More competition
There is more competition coming. Schwarzkopf, a global cosmetics giant, is conducting trials of custom products in Japan. Its system includes a hand-held device with an infrared sensor that can detect the hair’s molecular structure and analyse its moisture levels. An in-salon machine that looks like the world’s fanciest coffee maker whips up products in 50 seconds, along with a label printed with a bar code for reordering.
Prose also adjusts based on environmental factors, which it gleans from your address
Unlike brands that offer different products for each hair “goal” (say, preserving colour or thickening hair), companies that customise say they can combine ingredients that will fulfil all your hair needs in a single shampoo, conditioner or hair mask.
Prose also adjusts based on environmental factors, which it gleans from your address. For example, if it thinks you may be spending a lot of time in indoor heating because it’s cold outside, it adds corn derivatives that smooth and condition to fight static.
"We tackle all your problems," said Arnaud Plas, the chief executive of Prose, sitting in the company's conference room, which is decorated with illustrations of coconut, mint and other good-for-hair ingredients. "We're not going to make you compromise." (The company says it has tested which ingredients could cancel one another's benefits.)
Sceptics
It's probably not surprising that there are sceptics. Maryanne Senna, a dermatologist and the director of the Hair Academic Innovative Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is unconvinced that customisable shampoos and conditioners work much better than standard ones.
“There are some things we very clearly know can be drying, but then there’s a lot of stuff they use that has no evidence to back it up,” Senna said. “Whether it’s the hair holy grail comes down to perception.”
Unless patients have very oily hair or dandruff or a known sensitivity or allergy, she does not recommend specific products. She tells them that everyone is different, and they have to find one that works for them.
‘Marketing gimmick’
Perry Romanowski, a cosmetic chemist and a founder of thebeautybrains.com, a site where scientists examine product ingredients and industry claims, called customisation "a marketing gimmick".
“There is nothing measurably different about their formulas in terms of performance,” Romanowski said.
He has run blind home-use tests of the 10 top-selling shampoos and conditioners. Pantene turned out to make the best-performing product.
A major driver of whether a product works is fragrance, which has no visible effect (unless you're allergic to it)
Moreover, he found that expensive shampoos don’t work better than cheap ones, but expensive conditioners work better than really inexpensive ones, like V05 or Suave, he said. That’s because the pricey conditioners have more types of nourishing ingredients, which all work differently, and together are more effective.
Still, he said, “super-expensive ones aren’t better than Pantene”.
But this is where things get knotty. A major driver of whether a product works – or really, whether a customer thinks it does – is fragrance, which of course has no visible effect (unless you’re allergic to it). In its early days, Function of Beauty had to spend more time tweaking scents than algorithms.
“Man, people care a lot more about fragrance than I ever thought they would,” said Dossa, who, when he started the company, had a shaved head, but now has a man bun so he can test products. “Customers won’t properly assess your product if they’re not happy with the fragrance.”
Smell
Prose does not offer customers who want a moisturising shampoo the option of choosing a citrus fragrance. Plas learned from his time at L’Oréal that customers will insist the product doesn’t work, because they associate that smell with grease removal. “Then we give them the exact same formula with a different scent, and they think it’s great,” he said, shaking his head.
Customers can't (yet) choose to ban a particular ingredient because of allergies and sensitivities
Another thing customers can’t (yet) choose easily: to ban a particular ingredient because of allergies and sensitivities. (Function of Beauty is vegan and gluten free; Prose allows you to choose those options. Both allow you to avoid fragrance, but you have to contact customer service to ban a specific ingredient.)
Lacey Harris, an athletic trainer, is allergic to coconut oil, an ingredient contained in her Function of Beauty products. She switched to Prose, which, purely by luck, didn't add that to her shampoo and conditioner.
Harris said she could really tell how much volume and wave the Prose products added to her hair when she bought Dove, which she once used, to share with her husband on a backpacking trip. “I couldn’t wait to get back to my custom shampoo,” she said.
– New York Times News Service
