Is Olaplex all it’s cracked up to be?

Hair care brand with cult following faces some backlash from online community

It was, perhaps, inevitable in 2022 that TikTok users would figure out how an of-the-moment slickedback bun could double as a self-care moment — and just as inevitable that the multitasking hairstyle would go viral.

Hence the Olaplex bun, where the “slick” of the bun comes from Olaplex No. 3, No. 6 or No. 7 — hair treatments whose users are so evangelical that they tweet things like “Tempted to put Olaplex down as my religion on the census form.” Recently, the hashtag #Olaplexbun had 47 million views. The hashtag/hairstyle wasn’t created by Olaplex, said JuE Wong, its CEO, though the company soon posted its own tutorial suggesting a cocktail of multiple products. “What started out as a treatment has transformed into a lifestyle accessory,” the company said on its website.

Fair enough. Olaplex has grown from three products made by hand in a surfboard-littered garage in Santa Barbara, California, in 2014 into a salon essential and a much-posted-about (and expensive) staple of millions of women’s at-home hair care routines. Along the way, the company — whose hero ingredient is said to repair hair and prevent damage from bleaching and dyeing — spawned many imitators and became shorthand.

In 2021, Olaplex knocked Dyson off its perch as hottest hair brand in a report by shopping site Cosmetify. Its 2022 rankings have not been released, but Matt Davies, the managing director, wrote in an email that Olaplex “will still come out on top. We sell every product, every day (stock permitting), and often have customers purchasing the complete collection despite the price.” (That’s about $225.)

In September 2021, Olaplex went public and was valued at more than $14 billion.

But for all the customers who think the products are capable of necromancing their hair, there is also dissent: unhappy customers, skeptical chemists, disillusioned colorists. Sephora.com has dozens of one-star reviews for Olaplex — some blaming the oils and creams for damage; many just saying the products don’t live up to the hype.

Every beauty brand engages in puffery to sell products. Olaplex has just been phenomenally successful at it.

“That it cures hair breakage sounded outlandish, so you had to try it,” said James Miju, a colorist in downtown Los Angeles, who first got his hands on Olaplex when it was still being made by hand in the garage, with every batch a different shade of yellow and the bottles not filled uniformly. He thinks its benefits are “exaggerated, but it still defies everything you think you know about hair.”

In late 2014, Dean Christal, the serial entrepreneur who founded Olaplex with his wife, Darcy, posted prolifically on a hair dye forum on which mostly professionals were questioning the new line. He responded in a series of 22 posts to every point raised. When people commented about his 22 posts, he wrote another 11 posts.

In response to the lack of information about how, specifically, Olaplex works, he wrote, “We are a small company and it’s us against the world that wants to copy our formula.” Barely two years later, Olaplex was suing L’Oréal for, among other things, allegedly infringing two patents and misappropriating trade secrets, after L’Oréal had met with Olaplex about possibly acquiring the company. (The case has since been settled to “mutual satisfaction,” Wong said, though she cannot discuss the terms.)

Hair is complicated

Olaplex’s claim is that it repairs the disulfide bonds. Technically, the repair claim may be an overstatement: Olaplex doesn’t fuse broken bonds but instead creates a different kind of bond, said Joseph Schwarcz, a chemist and the director of the McGill University Office for Science and Society.

Perry Romanowski, a cosmetic chemist and a founder of thebeautybrains.com, a website and podcast on which scientists examine product ingredients and industry promises, was skeptical of Olaplex’s claims. The company’s top-selling product, its No. 3 Hair Perfector, says on the label that it is “NOT a conditioner”; it’s designed to be used before shampoo and rinsed out.

Yet Romanowski pointed out that many of its ingredients are standard conditioning agents. They’re most likely responsible for the shine, smoothness and “manageability” Olaplex touts, he wrote in an email.

None of the chemists The New York Times interviewed could find ingredients in Olaplex formulas that might cause the breakage some reviewers have described. Several colorists pointed out that people who use Olaplex often have damaged hair in the first place, so what happens may not be caused by the product.

An elusive origin story

Olaplex’s origin story is hard to pin down. Few accounts — even of how Christal met Craig Hawker, a University of California, Santa Barbara, chemistry professor — are the same. One of the only constants is that Hawker, a former researcher at IBM’s innovation lab, enlisted his former graduate student Eric Pressly, whose garage was the birthplace of the first batches of Olaplex.

Pressly’s spokesperson abruptly canceled a scheduled interview after I sent questions she had requested. She said they were “too detailed.” Hawker requested questions via email and then did not reply. Christal did not respond to interview requests. (Neither of the scientists was ever directly employed by the company,

Wong said, and Christal is no longer there. In 2019, private equity firm Advent International acquired Olaplex for an undisclosed sum.)

The first Olaplex product was an in-salon treatment that looked like beer and smelled like wood but was essentially the hero molecule mixed with water, said stylists who used it at the time. Christal took a sample to colorist Tracey Cunningham in Beverly Hills, California, he told Modern Salon, “and she used it the next day on Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez.”

Olaplex’s strategy was a winner. The company’s products are the kinds of thing people come into the salon and ask for by name.

“I’d never seen that before Olaplex,” said Cara Craig, a colorist at Suite Caroline in SoHo.

Salons can charge for both the professional treatments and the retail products. Miju said that at one point, Salon Republic in West Hollywood, California, his former salon, was making about $8,000 a month in Olaplex profits alone, with four or five fulltime hairstylists ensuring that “every customer would leave with a product.”

Bad hair days

Earlier this year, the same platforms that helped turn Olaplex into a household name hosted far less friendly content: A TikTok video that went viral said that the European Union and Britain would ban Olaplex No. 3 for containing lilial, an ingredient used in trace amounts as a fragrance — and linked to infertility. The company responded quickly, destroying $4.3 million worth of inventory, Wong said, and announcing a reformulation.

Still, the company remains secretive, even by beauty company standards. It would not allow access to any scientists or make Wong available until I had submitted written questions. Nor would it specify when it would be out of the quiet period the Securities and Exchange Commission imposes around releases of earnings and thus whether anyone would speak at all. A company spokesperson joined the Zoom call with Wong and interjected frequently.

When I asked Wong how she copes, as the chief executive of a hair care company, when she is having a bad hair day, the spokesperson assured me that Wong never has such days.