- Black consumers drive much of the hair-care industry’s multibillion-dollar valuation.
- Natural-hair products rake in big bucks, but their efficiency varies based on strand texture.
- To help, the hair-tech companies Myavana, HairDays, and OurX personalize product recs and services.
- This article is part of “Build IT,” a series about digital tech and innovation trends that are disrupting industries.
Hair care has transformed into one of the most profitable sectors of the consumer-goods industry.
An August report from Fortune Business Insights found that the global hair-care market is projected to go from a valuation of $99.5 billion in 2023 to $147.5 billion by 2030.
Data reveals that Black consumers are driving the booming market, spending nine times more on hair-care products than other racial groups, a 2023 Nielsen report found. Black women, in particular, spend about $1.7 billion annually on hair-care products.
Although Black consumers play a significant role in making the hair-care industry lucrative, many of their dollars go to waste as they struggle to find which specific hair products work for them.
That experience led Candace Mitchell Harris to create her beauty-tech company, Myavana — which she describes as the world’s first personalized, instant hair-analysis system — in 2011. During her junior year at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she studied computer science, she started her natural-hair journey and became fed up with trying products that dried out her hair and led to breakage.
Harris’ discontent with the trial-and-error approach piqued her interest in learning the science of hair, including how products react to certain kinds of hair. After discovering different variables in hair strands and hair products, Harris wanted to create an algorithm that could take data about hair and match it to products that would provide the best results.
She pitched her idea at Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize, a faculty-led innovation competition for undergraduate students. She made it to the semifinals, and the seed was planted for Myavana to blossom into what it is today.
“I wanted to take a shot at inventing something that I think could solve a big problem,” Harris told Insider. For Black women, hair is “such a core part of who we are and how we present ourselves in the world,” she said. “How our hair looks is such a part of our identity. So that was really important to me.”
Using AI to provide personalized insights and hair regimens that actually work
Myavana created a hair-identification system called MyHairID that breaks down hair-strand profiles by category, including texture blends such as coarse and curly. Harris said a person’s hair ID is as unique as a fingerprint, and AI is the most accurate way to determine a person’s distinctive blend.
Harris said users can take a photo of their hair on their phone and upload it to the MyHairID tool on the Myavana app, and they’ll be prompted to answer questions about their hair challenges and goals. MyHairID will then provide product recommendations based on ingredients that work best on a user’s hair type.
Tiffany St. Bernard, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering and is the founder and CEO of HairDays, told Insider she’s seen firsthand how “spot-on” AI can be. When it comes to identifying hair types, it can often recognize “the tiniest details we humans might miss,” she said.
After facing serious health problems that caused hair loss, St. Bernard — a biomedical engineer and Cornell Tech postdoctoral research fellow — recognized a critical need for innovation in the hair-care space.
She worked closely with experts to build out her company’s AI tech, called Layla, which has looked at data from hundreds of thousands of hair profiles to understand the nuances of human hair.
“We know hair can change, like if someone is on medications or if their hair gets damaged,” said St. Bernard. “So our AI isn’t just about guessing hair types; it’s more about helping everyone get to know their holistic hair and scalp profile from the inside out.”
OurX is another company that emphasizes the importance of personalized care for healthy curls. It was founded by a veteran executive, Ceci Kurzman, who wanted to see more innovative services that thoughtfully catered to people with textured hair. To help meet this need, Kurzman brought on Meghan Maupin as the data-tech platform’s CEO in 2022.
Maupin cofounded and served as CEO of Atolla, a company that specializes in customized skincare, which was acquired by Function of Beauty in 2021. Coming from the world of beauty personalization, Maupin wanted to support Kurzman’s mission of supporting people with tighter coils.
There are many factors that affect natural hair, such as humidity and porosity, Maupin told Insider. “That personalization makes so much sense for this audience,” she said.
OurX focuses on providing consumers with information relevant to their hair and hair regimens. Some of their services provide a daily care routine, advice from an expert coach, and curated educational content. Maupin said the company has seen high consumer engagement based on the 85% to 90% completion rate of its 30-question hair assessment — results she said she’s never seen in her career.
OurX has also collected over 100,000 data points on hair within the first couple of months of its launch and has received helpful feedback from customers about their results after they were matched with a hair-care regimen.
Using tech to gather hair data is yielding effective results
Harris told Insider that Myavana has created a huge database of textured hair by cataloging over 2 billion hair strands, which were sent to the company’s lab, through microscopic analysis and the images used to train the company’s AI system.
Harris said 76% of people who used the company’s AI tool purchased products it recommended, and users reported a 90% satisfaction rate. The company has also licensed its tech to retailers including SheaMoisture and Unilever.
More innovation in the hair-care space to come
When it comes to expanding the companies, Myavana and OurX aim to create an even better experience for those who are rocking their natural hair.
For Myavana, that means partnering with brands to make the company’s personalized hair-care technology available “everywhere you shop for hair products,” Harris said.
St. Bernard said that the HairDays’ AI tech is just the beginning of a larger mission to improve the standard of care for hair and scalp problems through AI, which she calls SOCAi, in collaboration with Cornell University’s chief global information officer, Curtis Cole, and the clinical dermatologist Dr. Andrew Alexis.
The initiative has received support from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Department of Health and Human Services. “We aim to showcase how AI can be a game changer in beauty, health, and overall well-being,” St. Bernard said.
“Our goal with our SOCAi products, such as the HairDays platform, is using technology to empower people to take control of their well-being by actually being able to see what products and treatments work as well as detect health concerns early,” she said. “We are particularly driven to provide equitable standards of care for marginalized and underserved communities often not widely included in health datasets.”
Maupin said OurX aims to create “an app that is the center of your hair-care journey,” incorporating everything necessary for styling healthy hair.
And as Myavana works to provide efficiency for its customers, Harris believes the use of AI could help consumers avoid the trial-and-error headaches that are so common in the beauty and wellness marketplaces.
“I want to see how AI can help enhance who we naturally are, and most importantly, just make our lives easier in terms of what to use and when, because I think that’s the ultimate search,” Harris said.
Maupin echoed that sentiment. “I think now, especially with the way that the beauty industry is moving more toward science and efficacy, rather than just being fad- or trend-driven, that we’ll really start to see AI being used to measure the efficacy of different products and even potentially alter or create new highly effective ingredients,” she said.
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