This Viral Hair Care Superstar Is Actually A Synthetic Biology Company

With over 20 billion views on TikTok—a top spot in Sephora’s bestseller list, and a fanbase that includes A-listers Rihanna, Hailey Bieber, Pete Davidson, and their stylists—K18 Hair is taking the world by storm.

So, why is this organization getting so much attention, you ask? Well, the synthetic biology haircare company’s patented K18PEPTIDE™ is a high-performance ingredient that reverses hair damage at the molecular level—in just four minutes.

Accelerating Beauty’s Return to Nature

K18 Hair’s success is spearheading a larger trend in the $570 billion beauty industry: the disruption of traditional ingredient manufacturing through synthetic biology.

According to NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, purchases for more than 90 percent of consumer packaged goods marketed as sustainable grew five times faster than their non-sustainable counterparts. Yet most ingredients in the beauty industry are still produced from plants, animals, and fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we cannot grow enough plants to satisfy the desire for “natural” ingredients.

By using living systems as factories, biotechnology can produce sustainable alternatives to natural ingredients in controlled environments through sustainable processes. Compared to plant extracts, biotech ingredients are more reliable, with higher efficacy and purity. They can also be created sustainably and locally without the need for complicated and increasingly risky supply chains.

“Our goal at K18 is to work with nature to develop products that are compatible with human biology, liberate expression, and are good for the planet,” says Suveen Sahib, K18 Hair’s CEO, who co-founded the company with his wife, Britta Cox in 2019. “Things get exciting when you consider that biotech allows us to engineer new, high-performance ingredients that can actually outperform those found in nature.”

Shaib will be part of a panel at SynBioBeta 2023: The Global Synthetic Biology Conference on May 23rd, discussing “How the Personal Care Industry is Driving Performance and Sustainability.” As synbio technologies improve and become more cost competitive, the industry has the opportunity to impact consumers in a broad range of markets, and Shaib will be there to provide insights on how his company has successfully harnessed the power of synthetic biology.

Engineering Biology to Create High-Performance Ingredients

“We spent a decade mapping and testing every amino acid sequence expressed in the human keratin genome to create a product that reverses hair damage from the inside out,” says Sahib. “Because our science borrows from nature to do the heavy lifting, we are able to deliver an elegant, simple solution and truly holistic hair repair.”

In hair care, cosmetic chemistry has allowed hair care professionals to achieve styling outcomes like colors, curling, and straightening. Yet typically, these provide only band-aid solutions for biology-based problems like dryness and frizz. That’s because cosmetic chemistry was not designed to care for, repair, or mimic biology. True repair, however, can be achieved through biology.

The K18PEPTIDE™ that powers the company’s flagship product is a high-performance ingredient born from biology, developed by applying computational models to mimic the molecular structure of human hair. As a result, the peptide is recognized as natural by the hair. And because it fits like a perfect puzzle piece, it helps reconnect broken pieces of hair or damaged sites—and it’s not washed away by water or shampoo like traditional bonding agents.

“Through our research, we realized the whole conversation that’s been happening in haircare around bond repair isn’t really addressing the core problem of damaged hair. The true indicator of hair strength and elasticity comes from the polypeptide chains in the inner layers of hair,” says Sahib. “The depth of biotech research is what has allowed us to bring radical simplicity, speed, and expression to millions of hair care routines across the globe,”

Simplifying Routines and Liberating Creativity

Salon professionals have found that the K18 product saves them between 400 and 600 hours annually. As a result of its simplicity and efficacy, the product has been a hit with haircare professionals. It has allowed them to exercise their creativity in less time and with less frustration.

“Biotechnology not only allows us to simplify routines, but as we engineer ingredients with new functionalities, we will create opportunities to be more creative with our routines, allowing us to express ourselves in never-before-seen ways,” Sahib concludes “The next generation of beauty products will be inspired by nature and engineered with biotechnology to work with our human biology. It will solve cosmetic, beauty, and personal care challenges that were previously unaddressable.”

References

Thank you to Karl Schmieder for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies I write about, such as K18 Hair, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.

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