I’m sure there’s someone out there who doesn’t hate their hair. Two entire people spring to mind. The rest of us complain about frizz, limpness, sparseness, and out-of-control-ness. Without all the haranguing, there would be no aisles of hair products, no $16.73 billion in hair-care sales in the U.S., no $160 shampoos made of so-called imperial Russian amber, and no French hair rituals—excuse me, rituels—for $380. Perhaps all these products simply fuel our dissatisfaction rather than quell it. But the pleas are simple enough: Is it too much to ask for a manageable curl, a modicum of shine, a swoop, a bounce, a dip, a flip?
The real brains behind all this hair angst is someone you probably haven’t heard of, and she’s O.K. with that. In 1990, she helped create the first frizz-defying marvel that became a bona-fide phenomenon. She sold that business and started another, addressing minor vexations: dark and gray roots that blossom between coloring appointments, frizz that explodes on a humid day, spray-resistant flatness.
