Briogeo

The recipes came first, and they were not written down anywhere useful. Nancy Twine grew up making hair and body treatments in her grandmother's kitchen from whatever was in the pantry, then went to Wall Street and spent years in finance before deciding that the products she had grown up with did not exist on any shelf she could find.

She launched the brand in 2013, aimed squarely at a gap that the mass market had spent decades ignoring: textured, curly and damaged hair, treated as a formulation problem worth solving properly rather than an afterthought section at the end of an aisle. The proposition combined naturally derived ingredients with a set of exclusions the brand codified as six-free, and it arrived at the moment when the clean-beauty conversation was moving from skincare into hair. Twine became the youngest African American founder to launch a product line at Sephora, and the brand grew into one of the largest independent Black-owned beauty companies in the country.

The exit came in April 2022, when Wella Company acquired it for a reported nine-figure sum, with Twine staying on to run it. By then the deep-conditioning franchise had become the anchor product and the brand had expanded well past its original remit into scalp care and styling.

The honest read separates two things that get bundled together. The formulations are genuinely good, particularly the protein-and-moisture repair products, which are built with an understanding of damaged and chemically processed hair that a lot of prestige hair care simply does not have. The clean framing is weaker. Sulfates and silicones are not hazards, and a free-from list is a marketing position rather than a safety one; silicone avoidance in particular is a preference with real trade-offs for detangling and heat protection. Buy this for the repair chemistry, which earns its price, and treat the exclusions as a formulation style rather than a health argument.

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