OUAI

The name is a joke that requires you to say it out loud. Pronounced like the French for yes, spelled to look like a fashion house, it captures the brand's whole register: knowing, a little arch, and entirely comfortable being about how things look and smell rather than pretending otherwise.

Jen Atkin was arguably the most visible hairstylist in the world when she launched it in 2016, with a client list that made her a fixture in the same photographs as the people she styled, and an Instagram following that meant the brand had an audience before it had a product. What she built was not a salon line translated to retail but something designed for the way people actually encountered products in the mid-2010s: photogenic bottles, fragrance treated as a headline feature rather than an afterthought, and a tone of voice that assumed the customer was in on it. The body category followed in 2019 and wide retail distribution in 2020. In December 2021 Procter & Gamble announced its acquisition, the group's first move into prestige hair care, with Atkin staying on as chief creative officer.

The honest read is that this is a very well-executed cosmetic brand and the fragrance is not a frivolous part of it. Scent is the single most reliable driver of whether someone keeps using a hair product, and the perfumery here is genuinely good, which is a real advantage rather than a decorative one. What the premium is not buying is a performance gap: the cleansing and conditioning chemistry is competent and conventional, and comparable results are available for considerably less money in plainer packaging. There is also no scalp-treatment proposition here in any medical sense, and the supplement side of the range rests on the same thin evidence that hair supplements generally do. Bought as a pleasure purchase that happens to work well, it is easy to justify.

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