Bridging the Haircare Innovation Gap: Science-Led Haircare Development

For years, haircare has lived in the shadow of skincare. Not for lack of market value or consumer relevance, but because innovation in hair is fundamentally harder to deliver, validate and communicate.

That perceived “haircare gap” was the focus of a recent industry webinar where THG LABS Account Head of R&D Dr. Catherine Leray joined other leading industry experts as a speaker sharing her thoughts on the challenges and opportunities for the category. What became clear is that haircare is at a critical inflection point.

The category is growing, premiumising and becoming more performance-driven but unlocking its full potential requires real expertise and rigour. Read on to hear Catherine’s insights and takeaways from the session.

Why Haircare Innovation Follows Different Rules

Haircare represents around one fifth of global beauty market value and is now worth over $100 billion worldwide, with mid-to-high single-digit CAGR forecast through to 2029, outpacing overall beauty category growth (Future of Haircare 2026 – WGSN Beauty,  Euromonitor, 2025). Yet when it comes to ingredient launches and clinical storytelling, skincare continues to dominate.

Skin is biologically active. It renews itself, responds to signals, and allows ingredients to tap into complex pathways that amplify visible results over time. Hair, by contrast, is biologically inert once it leaves the follicle. There is no regenerative cascade waiting to be activated. That difference matters.

Hair innovation relies on engineering performance at the fibre level rather than stimulating biological response. Results depend on surface interactions, deposition efficiency, formulation architecture and sensory precision. In other words, haircare success is built quietly, structurally and often invisibly.

Applying skincare logic directly to haircare can appear progressive, but without translation to fibre behaviour it often results in limited real-world performance, frustrated consumers and stalled premium ambitions. 

Why the Market Is Forcing a Rethink

Despite these challenges, haircare is where some of the most compelling growth is now happening.

Healthy hair and scalp have grown in importance, driven by treatments and leave-in products that allow longer contact time and more meaningful performance. Prestige hair serums grew strongly across Europe in the first half of 2025, and premium and mastige haircare are outpacing mass, which is now in decline.

Crucially, premium spend is shifting. As skincare matures and growth stabilises, consumers are reallocating value towards hair, particularly solutions that promise repair, longevity and visible transformation. This represents a structural premiumisation of haircare, driven by performance expectations rather than packaging or positioning alone.

The Real Barriers to Haircare Innovation

Technical Reality and Performance Architecture

Most haircare products are rinse-off, with contact times of just 30 to 60 seconds. For any formulation to perform, ingredients must deposit efficiently, survive dilution and rinsing, and leave hair feeling good enough that consumers want to use it again.

This is why some of the most meaningful innovation in haircare happens beneath the surface. Performance is often driven less by headline actives and more by formulation architecture — how polymers, conditioning agents and deposition systems are engineered to interact with the hair fibre over repeated use.

Technologies such as coacervate systems, cationic polymers and quaternary compounds play a critical role in managing friction, flexibility and cuticle integrity over time, even if they rarely feature in marketing narratives.

In practice, optimising how a formulation behaves across multiple wash cycles often delivers more reliable consumer benefit than adding increasingly complex actives that struggle to survive a rinse-off environment.

Consumer Risk Aversion

Hair mistakes are visible and persistent. Unlike skincare, where consumers are far more open to experimentation and when a poorly suited product can often be discontinued with minimal long-term impact, haircare outcomes can linger for weeks through feel, buildup or compromised fibre condition.

Brand loyalty reflects this. Nearly half of US consumers consistently use the same shampoo brand (YouGov – What Shapes Haircare Choice?), making switching a high-risk decision that innovation must justify clearly.

Education and Adoption Timelines

Hair damage, structure and repair are poorly understood outside professional circles. In addition to claims, innovation also requires education. Breakout brands have succeeded because they invested heavily in education, professional endorsement and evidence-led storytelling.

Bond-Building as a Signal of Category Evolution

Bond-building is a clear signal of how the category is evolving. What is particularly telling is where growth is happening. Treatments are expanding fastest, but shampoos and conditioners are also seeing strong uptake.

For brands, the opportunity is how to enter the bond-building space credibly, differentiating through delivery, substantiation and real-world performance.

Where Innovation Is Really Unlocking Value

Leave-In and Scalp Solutions

Extended contact time allows for richer biological narratives and faster perceived benefits. Consumers increasingly expect scalp improvements within one to two weeks, alongside visible hair condition enhancement.

Delivering both requires careful balancing of stability, texture, deposition and regulatory compliance across diverse hair types. It is technically demanding, but commercially powerful when done well.

A Development Perspective: 
What Haircare Innovation Really Requires

From a formulation and manufacturing standpoint, haircare demands an integrated approach.

It requires teams who understand fibre behaviour as deeply as ingredient chemistry. It requires early testing to correlate formulation changes with measurable performance, reducing late-stage reformulation driven by opinion rather than evidence. And it requires commercial realism, with scale-up feasibility, ingredient availability and cost considerations built in from the outset.

With 80 percent of consumers saying scientific validation influences their purchasing decisions (KEARNEY : Prestige Beauty Consumer Index: the next frontier of US beauty consumers 2025), haircare can’t simply rely on borrowed skincare narratives alone. Performance has to be demonstrable, repeatable and fit the format.

Rather than copying skincare, bridging the haircare gap is about respecting hair’s biological limits and engineering solutions that work within them.

Haircare at an Inflection Point

Haircare is entering a phase skincare has already moved through. From fast trend adoption to longer-term platforms. From claim-led launches to evidence-led performance. From experimentation to trust.

The brands that win in this next era will be those that invest in formulation architecture, embrace education as part of innovation, and partner with developers who understand both the science and the scale.

Haircare may not regenerate itself, but innovation in this category is very much alive. The challenge, and the opportunity, lies in building it the right way.

Author Profile

Dr. Catherine Leray 
Account Head of R&D, THG LABS 

Dr Catherine Leray , Account Head of Research & Development at THG LABS, has worked as a cosmetic scientist for over 25 years and is passionate about the science behind truly effective personal care products.

Specialised in haircare, she enjoys turning research into practical solutions that deliver tangible results, developing products with proven benefits without overlooking the importance of sensorial experience.

Her work in R&D is driven by a deep understanding of consumer needs and the scientific principles that make effective haircare possible.