Mielle

It began in a kitchen with one product and a nurse's understanding of what happens when people are not listened to. Monique Rodriguez had worked in labour and delivery before turning to hair care in 2014, building the brand with her husband around textured hair and natural ingredients, in a market that had spent a very long time treating that customer as a niche.

Growth was steady and then abruptly not. An outside investment arrived in 2021 on the back of roughly forty million dollars in annual sales, and shortly afterwards a rosemary and mint scalp oil became one of the most virally recommended products on the internet, carried by video after video of people reporting thicker hair. In January 2023 the brand was acquired by Procter & Gamble in what was reported as the largest acquisition of a beauty brand owned by a Black female founder, with both founders staying on to run it as a separate operation.

The virality created a problem the brand did not choose. A product formulated for textured hair was suddenly being bought by an audience with entirely different hair, some of whom found it heavy or greasy, and the acquisition prompted real anxiety among long-standing customers that a formula built for them would be diluted for a broader market. That the founders addressed this publicly, repeatedly, says something about how seriously the original community took it.

The honest read is that the brand's core competence, moisture and strengthening formulations for textured hair, is genuine and well earned. The rosemary oil deserves more caution than the internet gave it: evidence for rosemary in hair growth rests on a small number of studies, and treating it as equivalent to established pharmacological options is a considerable overstatement. Used as a scalp oil in a routine built for your actual hair type, it is a good product. Used as a hair-loss treatment on the strength of a video, it is likely to disappoint, and genuine hair loss deserves a diagnosis rather than a bottle.

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