5 Insights on scalp care

Dr Isfahan Chambers-Harris launched Alodia Hair Care in 2017. Avid readers of Cosmetics Design will recall Dr Chambers-Harris from her Indie Beauty Profile​ published here a few years back.

And the key details of her medical background can be gleaned from this short bio, Dr Chambers-Harris recently shared:

“Dr Isfahan Chambers-Harris earned her PhD in Bio-Medical Sciences from Morehouse School of Medicine, Cardiovascular Research Institute. She officially began her medical career as a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt School of Medicine and conducted genetic research on an autoimmune disease, Sarcoidosis.”​

“While at Vanderbilt, Dr. Isfahan also earned her Master’s in Public Health, which allowed her to focus on diseases that affect disadvantaged populations. After earning her Masters, she went on to become a Presidential STEM Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) in Bethesda, Maryland.”​

Scalp care is an emerging category but certainly not new one

As the popularity of skin care expands beyond the face, brands that leverage popular skin care ingredients and product formats in other categories are seeing success as well. (Read about the recent launch of Dove Hair Therapy formulated with ingredients like Hyaluronic Acid and Niacinamide here on Cosmetics Design.​) One of these other categories is scalp care.

Launched in 2017, “today Alodia is a science based clean hair and scalp care brand​ focusing on providing holistic solutions for chronic scalp conditions, hair dryness and breakage and styling options for textured hair types,” ​Dr Chambers-Harris tells this publication.

And in her video insights at the top of page, she explains why scalp care is very much its own category as well as how scalp care product formulations must—especially in the textured hair market—be developed with hair care in mind.

“The scalp has a very different environment from the rest of your body, with its high density of hair strands and its numerous sebaceous glands. [And, it] has a very different and highly specific microbe environment,” ​says Dr Chambers-Harris, going on the describe how this environment very much dictates what sorts of ingredients work best in natural scalp care product formulations.

And later on, Dr Chambers-Harris explains that “although we should treat scalp care as a separate category, we should always remember the interdependent relationship as well as the proximity of the scalp to the hair. This is why it is extremely important, particularly with textured hair types like my own, to create products that not only treat the scalp condition but are highly moisturizing to the hair strands.”​

Watch the full video interview at the top of the page to hear more insights on scalp care from Dr Isfahan Chambers-Harris of Alodia Hair Care.