Hair straightening today offers the beauty marketplace what hair coloring offered in the late 1990s, according to Diagonal Reports. The market research company finds that new technologies and products have revolutionized the category and in turn, the demand for hair control is growing exponentially, spurring changes in demographics and even lifestyles.
Innovative solutions offer flexibility and choice in the type of straightening/smoothing and have successfully rolled out to consumers in Latin America, Africa, North America, Asia and Europe—all populations with totally different hair types. Brazil remains the largest hair straightening market, with its insatiable demand for hair combability solutions and products. Chinese women are intensive users of hair control technologies, and in the United States, new hair straightening and smoothing treatments have become mainstream because they offer styling versatility to every type of—African American, Caucasian, Hispanic—hair.
Straightening, until more recently, was mainly accomplished using chemical relaxers. However, new methods were enthusiastically adopted by frustrated consumers—chemical, chemical-free and tools as well as curl control and defrizzing. In contrast, chemical relaxing has not benefited from this demand, and sales are stagnant.
