Personalization charts an innovative beauty frontier. While many have looked into the body’s peculiarities to develop customized skincare routines, a fledgling company is lending them to individualized hair shampoo and conditioner.
Online haircare startup Function of Beauty offers paraben, sulfate and cruelty free concoctions that respond to the specific needs of its customers’ scalps and hair. Founded by computer scientist Zahir Dossa, engineer Joshua Maciejewski and cosmetic chemist Hien Nguyen, the direct-to-customer operation wields precise computer algorithms of more than 12 billion haircare options that ensure no two shampoo and conditioner duos are the same.
Winding through the Silicon Valley-meets-high-end-salons aesthetics of Function of Beauty, the route to customized hair products commence with constructing a hair profile on the firm’s website. Customers indicate their hair type (straight, wavy, curly or coily), structure (fine, medium and coarse) and scalp moisture (dry, normal, oily). Then, they set five hair goals out of 17, including oil control, anti-aging, volume and nourishment. After selecting the dyes and scents of their shampoo and conditioner, shoppers can opt to have their name printed on the bottles (talking about these subtle personal touches of faceless e-commerce!).
While the products tilt toward the expensive tip of the scale (eight ounces of shampoo and as many of conditioner clock at $36), clients’ exultant testimonials seem to justify the cost. Packaged in a hip box together with an ingredients list and a recommended hair regimen, the products appear to miraculously fix staunch split ends and limp, greasy roots, which, when compounded, are the result as much as the bane of daily hair styling.
We are in to lather our manes in Function of Beauty.