Back to Your Roots: a Scalp 101

Oily? Dry? Flaky? Scalps can give you more mixed signals than that date who keeps ghosting you. We have done the decoding so you don’t have to!

- Kate Pasola

Do you make a habit of exfoliating your scalp? Because we, for one, certainly don’t. In fact, last year, when the topic of scalp health began to capture the imagination of beauty brands and their customers, the whole thing felt slightly exasperating. Fantastic—a new body part to worry about! Wasn’t nailing a 12-step skincare regime, finding the ultimate broad-spectrum SPF, dry-brushing our entire body and rolling in CBD oil before booking our next session of lymphatic drainage enough to appease the gods of beauty? Somehow we are now expected to cleanse, tone, and moisturise our scalp, too?

The modern cosmetics industry, with its hundreds of new launches per month and billions in profits per year, can often feel as though it’s one big ferris wheel we can’t escape. There’s a constant, low-level panic to stir up trends and invent new genres of beauty to fill our shelfies (while depleting our bank accounts), so who can blame us for rolling our eyes and tuning out? But is the next big thing really as, er, flaky as it seems?

GOOD FOUNDATIONS

On this occasion, the answer is no. Percy & Reed’s consultant trichologist Nicola Smart compares the link between a healthy scalp and good hair to a flowerbed. “Think of the scalp as being the soil, and the hair follicles being the flowers. If you don’t nourish the soil, you can’t grow healthy flowers.”