Over the past months, to the complete surprise of every roommate I’ve ever had, I acquired a green thumb. It’s hard to ignore the needs of houseplants when you are similarly planted at home. The succulent hanging in the kitchen window hit yardstick length at the same time my braid began tucking into my waistband. I snipped off the occasional shriveled leaf with the same attention that I gave my split ends. Meditative pruning gave me the feeling of a bonsai master, which made my hair something of a bonsai itself: steadfast and deserving of preservation, like an old-growth forest in miniature.
As my focus shrank to the scope of my Brooklyn apartment—sustaining life with regular waterings and conditioning hair masks—my household input-output highlighted a far-reaching concern. Delivery boxes piled up; recycling bins neared overflow. Surveying shampoo bottles lining the tub, I recalled a stark warning from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation: By 2050, there could be more plastic in the oceans than fish.
“What is the future? What do we need to be doing?” Helen Reavey, the hairstylist behind Act+Acre, says about the push for sustainability. Since its debut two years ago, Act+Acre has been rooted in earthly matters. Refill pouches of its hair cleanse and conditioner minimize the pale brown plastic bottles in circulation. The new castor-oil mask, which landed just in time to cocoon my moisture-sapped hair, comes in an aluminum tube. Recyclable in one sense, regenerative in another, it speaks to the conservation of resources. “It’s about creating good habits,” Reavey says, “and treating yourself at the same time.”
The drive to deliver clean formulas in mindful packaging is visible across the industry. Sándor—a sleek newcomer from hairstylist Sabrina Szinay and Taja Feistner, a model studying sustainability policy—just launched a biodegradable shampoo and conditioner in earthy aluminum vessels. The metal can be “infinitely recycled,” says Feistner. “Basically 75 percent of the aluminum that has ever been mined is still in use today.” Anomaly, a new range from Priyanka Chopra Jonas, pairs recycled-plastic bottles with ingredients that read like a recipe: rosemary, quinoa, coconut oil. R+Co has rolled out Bleu, a sustainable hair-care capsule, with color-blocked containers made from post-consumer-recycled plastic as well as sugarcane bioresin—an effort to reduce the virgin- plastics pipeline. The wave of shampoo bars promises an end to packaging altogether, but long-haired traditionalists can take some comfort in Rahua’s math: One (recycled-plastic) bottle equals one acre of Amazon rain forest preserved.
“It’s not just about what product do you deliver, but what’s your purpose?” says Barbara De Laere, Aveda’s global brand president. In January, the company announced model-activist Arizona Muse as its first sustainability advocate, amplifying existing efforts: vegan formulas, improved plastics, even blockchain-tracked sourcing for vanilla. Over Zoom, Muse talks up the lightweight mask in the new Botanical Repair line, which protects against the elements. Still, she gestures to her chin-length bob, “I have actually found the hack to damaged hair, which is just to have short hair.”
That sounds freeing, a lighter chop to go with a lighter carbon footprint. But I can’t shake the defining image from Miranda July’s Kajillionaire: the waist-length hair worn by Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood). In the film, the androgynous protagonist lives with grifter parents in a bubble factory, where pink froth seeps down the wall like an unholy shampoo. However much Old Dolio’s hair exists outside the realm of style, “not cutting it isn’t simply passive,” July explains by email. “It also is kind of tree-like in its strength, elemental. It just grows. There’s something deeply sexy about that.” Like those rain forest acres spared by well-meaning hair care, old growth deserves a new lease on life.
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