Haircare Industry Landscape

The European Haircare Market

The European haircare market is among the largest in the world, generating approximately EUR 80 billion annually across products, salon services, and professional treatments. Within this market, the segment specifically serving textured and Afro-textured hair represents a fraction of total investment — despite serving an estimated 150 million consumers across the continent.

This analysis examines the major industry players, their engagement with textured hair, their diagnostic and research capabilities, and the structural gaps that persist. The purpose is not to criticise. It is to map the terrain accurately, identify where the industry has made genuine progress, and document where significant gaps remain.

Multinational Corporations

L’Oreal Group

L’Oreal is the world’s largest beauty company, with a research and innovation budget exceeding EUR 1.1 billion annually. The group operates over 20 research centres globally and has made meaningful investments in textured hair science.

Textured hair portfolio: L’Oreal’s portfolio includes several brands with textured hair lines. Kerastase, the group’s premium professional brand, offers the Curl Manifesto range. L’Oreal Professionnel includes curl-specific formulations. The group’s acquisition strategy has brought brands with textured hair expertise into its portfolio, though integration of this expertise across the broader R&D pipeline remains uneven.

Diagnostic technology: L’Oreal has invested heavily in beauty technology, including the My Hair Diagnosis tool and broader AI-driven personalisation. However, our analysis of these tools reveals that their training data remains predominantly oriented toward straight and wavy hair types, limiting their accuracy and relevance for consumers with tightly coiled or kinky textures.

Research contribution: L’Oreal maintains proprietary hair fibre databases that are among the most comprehensive in the industry. These databases, however, are not publicly accessible, limiting their utility for independent research. The data collection methodology — including sampling populations and measurement protocols — is not externally validated for ethnic diversity.

Unilever

Unilever’s beauty and personal care division encompasses several brands relevant to textured hair, most notably Dove and SheaMoisture.

Dove CROWN Coalition: Dove’s contribution extends beyond products. The Dove CROWN Coalition, co-founded in 2019, has been instrumental in advancing hair discrimination legislation in the United States. The coalition’s research — particularly the finding that Black women’s hair is 2.5 times more likely to be perceived as unprofessional (Dove/LinkedIn, 2023) — has become foundational data cited in legislative proceedings across 24 US states. CROWN’s research programme builds on the methodology Dove helped establish, extending it to the European context where equivalent data does not yet exist.

SheaMoisture: Acquired by Unilever in 2017, SheaMoisture is one of the most recognised textured hair brands in the US market. Its European presence is growing but remains limited compared to mainstream brands. The acquisition raised questions within the natural hair community about whether a multinational corporation would maintain the brand’s commitment to textured hair expertise.

Product research: Unilever’s R&D centres conduct hair fibre research, but — as with L’Oreal — the datasets are proprietary and the degree to which they represent the full spectrum of textured hair types is not independently verified.

Henkel

Henkel’s beauty care division operates Schwarzkopf Professional and several consumer brands. The company’s engagement with textured hair has historically been more limited than L’Oreal’s or Unilever’s, though recent years have seen expanded offerings.

Professional division: Schwarzkopf Professional serves salons across Europe, including training programmes and product lines. The company has introduced curl-specific products, though the professional training curriculum for textured hair handling remains less developed than for straight hair techniques.

Retail and Distribution

Sephora

Sephora, owned by LVMH, has made public commitments to expanding its textured hair offering. The 15 Percent Pledge, adopted in the US market, commits Sephora to dedicating at least 15 percent of its shelf space to Black-owned brands. The European implementation of this commitment varies significantly by market, with France and the UK showing more progress than other European territories.

Sephora’s role is significant because retail visibility directly influences consumer access. When textured hair products are relegated to a small corner of a store — or are absent entirely — it reinforces the message that these hair types are marginal, unusual, or not worth investing in.

Niche and Mission-Driven Brands

A growing ecosystem of smaller brands serves the textured hair market with greater specificity and cultural competence than many multinational offerings.

Cantu: Originally a US brand, Cantu has established meaningful European distribution, particularly in the UK and France. The brand offers affordable products formulated for textured hair, filling a gap at the mass-market price point that many multinational brands have been slow to address.

Pattern Beauty: Founded by Tracee Ellis Ross, Pattern Beauty has expanded beyond the US market. The brand’s approach — designing products around curl pattern, porosity, and density rather than ethnicity — aligns with CROWN’s evidence-based approach to hair classification. Pattern Beauty demonstrates that precise, science-informed formulation can serve textured hair consumers at scale.

SheaMoisture: As noted above, now under Unilever’s ownership but maintaining a distinct brand identity focused on textured hair.

Flora & Curl, Boucleme, Only Curls: European-founded brands addressing textured hair needs. These brands represent a growing entrepreneurial ecosystem, but they operate with significantly smaller research budgets than multinationals, limiting their ability to invest in diagnostic tools or clinical validation.

Diagnostic Tools and Technology

The industry’s approach to hair diagnostics reveals one of the most significant gaps. Existing diagnostic tools — both in-salon and consumer-facing — rely predominantly on visual assessment, questionnaires, or AI models trained on insufficiently diverse datasets. Our detailed analysis of AI diagnostics documents this gap comprehensively.

In-salon diagnostics: Most European salons assess hair using visual inspection and touch — subjective methods that vary enormously between practitioners. Standardised diagnostic protocols for textured hair are effectively non-existent in mainstream European salon education.

Consumer diagnostics: Online hair diagnostic tools, including those offered by L’Oreal and Kerastase, typically ask users to self-classify their hair type using visual reference images. These images frequently underrepresent tightly coiled and kinky textures, and the resulting recommendations reflect this bias.

The measurement gap: This is where CROWN’s diagnostic technology addresses a structural industry need. Without objective, sensor-verified measurement of hair properties — fibre diameter, porosity, hydration, protein structure — both product development and product recommendation remain anchored in subjective assessment. The industry needs better measurement infrastructure. CROWN is building it.

Research and Development Gaps

Several structural gaps persist across the industry.

Training data bias: AI and machine learning models used for hair analysis and product recommendation are only as good as their training data. When training datasets underrepresent textured hair types, the resulting models systematically underserve a significant portion of the population. This is not a theoretical concern — it is a documented pattern across multiple commercial diagnostic tools.

Formulation research: The science of textured hair care — optimal hydration, protein balance, porosity management, protective styling impact — remains less researched than the equivalent science for straight hair. This is not because the science is more difficult. It is because research investment has historically followed market assumptions about which consumers are worth serving.

Clinical evidence: Claims about product efficacy for textured hair are less frequently supported by clinical trials than equivalent claims for straight hair products. The CROWN Hair Commons aims to provide the open, multi-ethnic dataset that would enable independent validation of product claims across all hair types.

Opportunities for Collaboration

CROWN’s analysis of the industry landscape is not adversarial. The multinational corporations, niche brands, and salon networks described here are potential partners in CROWN’s mission.

For multinational R&D teams: CROWN’s diagnostic technology and CROWN Hair Commons offer the diverse, sensor-verified data needed to improve product formulation and recommendation accuracy across all hair types.

For retail partners: CROWN’s CDI research provides the evidence base for understanding why inclusive retail experiences matter — not just ethically, but commercially.

For salon networks: CROWN’s corporate training programme and future diagnostic certification offer salon professionals the tools to serve textured hair clients with the same precision and confidence they apply to straight hair clients.

For niche brands: CROWN’s open Data Commons levels the playing field, giving smaller brands access to research-grade data that was previously available only to corporations with billion-euro R&D budgets.

The industry is moving — slowly, unevenly, but perceptibly — toward greater inclusion. CROWN’s role is to accelerate that movement by providing the measurement infrastructure, the data, and the evidence that make inclusion not just an aspiration but a measurable, verifiable standard.