Issue link: https://www.ahpindiestylist.com/i/1547346
42 AHP Indie Stylist Volume 7 Issue 2 "I think about hair longevity as the long game," says Hana Sheikh, a cosmetic chemist and senior director of product development at Innersense Organic Beauty, "how you keep hair strong, resilient, and vibrant across years, and not just how it looks aer one wash." For hair pros and their clients, it's a subtle but meaningful shi to treating hair as something to protect over a decade rather than manage from one wash or one salon appointment to the next. A MORE AWARE AUDIENCE In the salon and in their daily lives, clients increasingly view hair care through the lens of skin longevity. Many worry about how their hair will hold up against aging, lifestyle shis, and environmental stress. A primary worry for clients over 35 is natural thinning, loss of elasticity or vibrancy, and changes triggered by hormonal shis like perimenopause, menopause, or rapid weight loss from things like GLP-1 medications. Desiree Crenshaw, a cosmetic chemist at TGS Labs and Consultancy, says the category splits into two oen overlapping groups: clients chasing longer, more resilient strands, and an aging population (oen people in perimenopause and beyond) encountering biological changes at the follicle level for the first time. "As we age, our follicle size changes," Crenshaw says. "It starts to shrink, and follicles also start to lose density—they're not growing as many hair fibers per unit as they had previously. You start to see thinning where you may have had thick, coarse individual hairs that become finer, and you can also lose density where you're not seeing as much hair, so it looks thinner as well." Clients will look to their stylists and barbers for answers. Even if some concerns are outside your scope, hair professionals are oen the first to notice when something's changed and can gently point those clients toward the right next step. But to do that, it's important to understand what's happening to hair at the microscopic level as we age and what hair professionals and consumers can realistically do to influence the natural process of aging. THE TWO PILLARS OF HAIR LONGEVITY: FIBER AND FOLLICLE Long before longevity entered the beauty industry lexicon, hopeful hairstylists learned a foundational fact in cosmetology school: e hair they spend all day shaping, coloring, and styling to perfection is already dead. For hair pros and their clients, it's a subtle but meaningful shift to treating hair as something to protect over a decade rather than manage from one wash to the next or one salon appointment to the next.