In Japan, Shiseido has had a similar response to Scalp Essence, the hero product of its Adenovital line sold in salons. Shiseido considers a salon product a success when sales reach 300,000 units. As of September, 1,100,000 units of Scalp Essence have been sold.
That type of success hasn’t gone unnoticed. Unilever put the scalp at the center of its Clear launch this year, advertising scalp health as crucial to the hair the way roots are to trees. “It turns the whole hair-care conversation on the head. Typically, we talk about the ends. Instead, we are taking about the source—the scalp,” says Boswell.
The scalp “is the natural evolution of where we are going, for sure,” agrees Bennett. “Right now, the American consumer is primarily focused on the hair strand itself, but the next logical place as hair-care brands are turning up the dial on efficacy is to look at the scalp.”
Because the scalp is actually living skin, and not dead hair, the implications of shifting the focus to the scalp are enormous. By utilizing specialized ingredients on the scalp, hair-care companies can seriously begin to discuss tackling the problems of aging hair at its origins and enter the arena of prevention, which has been a boon to skin-care marketers reaching younger consumers. As Mindy Goldstein, vice president of research and development at Keranique marketer Atlantic Coast Media Group, says, “There is not a lot that you can do once the hair emerges from the scalp other than thicken it. You have polymers, protein treatments that adhere to the shaft. All of that is physical. If you address the underlying mechanism from the scalp and the follicle, you can help grow thicker hair."
With scalp health coming to the fore, hair-care and color marketers are turning to vitamins and nutrients people typically ingest as topical agents to shore up the scalp. Biotin and melanin, for instance, are popping up in hair care and color products to strengthen hair and encourage melanin production, respectively. "When the hair becomes gray, it is very affected by UV, and it becomes dryer and damaged. That's why we use melanin in hair color, to put it back where it is missing," says Azizova.
Cracking the hair-loss problem with over-the-counter remedies remains a key mission. SymphonyIRI Group's figures show sales of hair-growth products increased nearly 4 percent to $78.4 million in the 52 weeks ended Aug. 12, a growth rate only surpassed in the hair segment by conditioners, which registered a 4.9 percent jump to almost $999 million in sales. The figures do not include Wa-Mart. To keep that growth going, hair-care marketers are infusing products with peptides, ingredients that helped spur the lash-enhancement phenomenon. Ker- anique has put peptides in its Follicle Boosting Serum to aid in anchoring follicles in the scalp. Taking it a step beyond, Allergan has been examining the active ingredient in its lash prescription Latisse for treating hair loss, already something that patients are testing on an off-label basis.
Mined extensively in skin care, Goldstein feels the field of epigenetics, the study of inherited changes, will be important in hair care. Within that field, the topic of telomeres is especially pertinent. “Telomeres are the tips of the genes. With every division of the cell, a small piece of the ends of the DNA are clipped off. It is actually what controls the amount of times a cell can divide. Telomeres is an area that is becoming interesting to hair care because the same thing happens in the follicle,” says Goldstein. In skin care, brands like ReVive, Jan Marini and Goldfaden have employed compounds intended to act as telomerase, an enzyme that preserves the length of telomeres, to make skin appear more youthful. That could surface in hair care with the purpose of reviving and protecting follicles.
Hair-care marketers, like their skin-care brethren, are concerned with pushing ingredients deeper into the scalp and hair shaft to improve their efficacy. “There’s a lot more technology available now in skin care that will be relevant for hair-care,” says Morris. “If you think about a root, it is so much deeper in the scalp than a wrinkle is in the skin.”
Even within the hair strand, hair-care marketers are getting deeper and paying attention to the cortex, the layer beneath the cuticle. Mary Burns, vice president of marketing for Alterna’s Caviar Repair Rx products, asserts that Alterna’s newest line cements “the outer layer of the cuticle to the cortex. You get a smooth cuticle that makes your hair look shiny, healthy and restored.” Alterna took two very close-up pictures of a hair strand to prove it—one displays cuticle tears and a visible cortex, and one doesn’t. “We look at it in terms of fillers for your hair,” Burns says.
Proof of results is becoming increasingly important in hair, say marketers. Bennett says, “With our hair-care clients, we are getting more and more requests to take them through clinical testing and consumer paneling. That really had not happened before. It is brand-new this year.” Alterna is among the first hair-care brands to promote testing in a line called Caviar Clinical that withstood clinical studies with consumer and scientific components. On the bottles, the Caviar Clinical products tout the studies, stating “Clinically Proven,” and “8 out of 10 people said their hair felt thicker and fuller.”
The final piece of the puzzle in increasing the hair-care category lies in convincing consumers to adopt multistep regimens. Around 90 percent of Americans use shampoo, estimates Geiger, but less than 20 percent use hair-treatment products. “There is a huge opportunity in growing a regimen with the right technologies. Many women are using two, three, four, five steps in skin care,” he says. To persuade consumers to establish hair-care regimens, hair-care brands have borrowed from the skin-care lexicon. Overton describes Pantene’s Silky Moisture Whip as a mois- turizer for hair. Burns talks about an a.m./p.m. routine made up of Alterna products. “In skin, you might have a different nighttime cream that targets wrinkles and a daytime cream that is about moisture. We do that in hair,” she says.
In skin care, women’s regimens extend to eye creams, sunscreens, toners, serums and on and on. Hair-care brands are dreaming up products that have specific tasks along similar lines. Overton compares split-end products to eye creams because they target a select part of the hair. “We are really looking at, ‘Are there things that we can do for different parts of the hair?’” she says. Answering her question in part, in addition to the ends, the roots and the outside and inside of hair strands might one day have their own products. And those products could be designed for different hair classifications to solve a vast array of problems.
Armed with skin-care weapons, hair-care companies are betting these new products will give hair-care consumers reasons to return to the hair-care aisles. “The way we think about it is that when we talk to the retailers, we add no value at the prestige end or at the food, drug and mass end if we replace a product with a similar one. We need to meet some unmet need,” says Geiger. “It is time that, in the U.S., we get inspired by what skin care does to grow the category.”
