Hair care shifts to natural

There’s a shift happening within the ethnic beauty market — specifically in the hair care segment — as competition in the category becomes more intense and as multicultural beauty marketers increasingly recognize the importance of breaking the borders between general and multicultural beauty.

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“A lot of brands are looking to cross over the different racial lines and not target one in particular, but talk texture. From my perspective, that makes sense because textured hair knows no color,” said Mahisha Dellinger, founder of hair care brand CURLS. “For me and my brand, we talk texture and not color. It is really about making the best product for textured, curly hair. ... We target women with natural textures, natural hair from waves, curls and kinks.”



The widening approach among multicultural beauty products seems to be resonating; however, there is a balancing act, as the audience expansion must not alienate longtime consumers.



Further fueling the shift is the continued focus on natural or non-chemically treated hair styles among African-American beauty shoppers, which has given rise to such styling products as styling moisturizers, setting lotions, curl creams and pomades. Unfortunately, the shift also has spelled sales declines of hair relaxers for the past several years.



According to the most recent data from IRI, sales of hair relaxers continued to decline during the 52 weeks ended Nov. 2 at U.S. multi-outlets, dropping more than 10%.



“For [hair relaxers] to be showing the double-digit declines ... across most channels is a little alarming, but it is shifting because, even though the relaxers are designed to give the woman a straight-style look, she still goes to that straight-style look. It is just that many are choosing to go there chemical-free. So, you have this natural trend,” Roslyn Chapman, founder of sales, marketing and distribution firm The Chapman Edge, told Drug Store News. “... She also is becoming more hair independent because YouTube and the Internet [are] teaching her how to do that.”



“It is important to keep [ethnic] as a department in the right stores because it can fuel sales on other aisles. ... I think there needs to be more cross-promoting. ... There are adjacencies that can be modeled past beauty so the store looks more like an ethnic store, so to speak.”