Kim Robinson on His Newest Range of Products for Asian Hair
Kim Robinson shares with us his history with hair, what inspired him to create his first range for Asian hair, and what’s to come in this line of products.
Not many Western hairstylists understand how to properly manage the complexity of Asian hair, but Kim Robinson seems to be the exception. First stepping foot on Asian soil 48 years ago, Robinson embarked on an amazing journey with Asian beauty.
“I always believed that [Asia] had some of the most beautiful women that I've ever seen, but they were never really truly represented,” he starts. “At the time, magazines were all full of Western women and Asian women were trying to achieve a beautiful look with images and products that were never really designed for them in the first place.”
Because of this, Robinson spent his youth working with some of the best hairstylists in the world – Alexander Perry in Milan, Kenneth in New York, and Vidal Sassoon in London – to gain insight into how to make a woman feel and look beautiful through communication and technique.
Today, Robinson remains one of the most respectable celebrity hairstylists in the world, having worked on big names like the late Diana, Princess of Wales, Kate Moss, and Anita Mui, among others. With his decades-worth of experience in the industry understanding different types of hair, Robinson has just released his first Hair Rejuvenation Formula range made for Asian hair after 10 years of research and development.
The range consists of a scalp cleanser and a hair treatment that comes with a brush for you to comb through your hair in the shower. “You put it on, you brush it through when you rinse it off, it's not something that you have to leave on,” Robinson says. “It's also not something that needs time for this particular product. It's for everyday use.”
Below, we talk to Robinson about his history with hair, what prompted him to create a haircare range targeted at Asians specifically, and what’s to come in his line of work.
How did you first get started working on Asian hair?
I've been very lucky. I came to Asia at a time, especially in Hong Kong, when things were changing. Hong Kong was changing from a manufacturing background to a service economy, and things were booming. And suddenly, the glitz and glamour were on everyone's list; balls and parties were an opportunity for me to share my talent. During the process, I was able to work with so many people in the recording industry, celebrities that worked in the entertainment business, in movies, et cetera.
We were pioneers in the Asian beauty field. The way we did hair, the way we did makeup, the way we looked at Asian women for the first time had never been seen before because it’s always been done in the West and never done in Asia.
What prompted you to create the Hair Rejuvenation Formula range?
I'm not in the business of making myself rich for a bottle of shampoo. To me, what's really exciting is doing something for the first time. This is something that I should have done a long time ago, but I didn't have the necessary information or the knowledge on how to do it. So it's taken me, a lot of time and energy searching for people to understand my predicament and what I was trying to say.
I'm so tired of these products that make your hair feel great when it's wet, but once it's dry, it just goes back to how it was before. Maybe it's a bit softer, but it's still dry. It drives me crazy. They all say they're going to do this and that, and you put on for 15 minutes, half an hour, and you do this, and I can't tell them any different.
Who should use the Hair Rejuvenation Formula range?
It’s for people who want to have a clean scalp and clean hair. It doesn't do anything except take everything away without drying out the scalp. With sensitive scalps, especially – it doesn't crease create any irritation. So it's been very successful in the salon as our house product. That's what we use when our VIP clients come in and they love it.
You will notice once you've used it that your hair will stay cleaner for longer. And that's something that's unusual because you will need to cleanse properly every day, if not every second day, most of the time. Your hair's not so sticky, it doesn't get flat, and it has more volume at the root, a feeling that’s different compared to those that contain products like silicones and all kinds of oils that coat the scalp.
We're not making any claims about hair loss, et cetera, but a healthier scalp will obviously produce healthy hair. There's no such shampoo in the world that's proven to grow hair on a bald head. But there are so many out there that do claim all these wonderful, magical things that are going to happen, but it all depends on a healthy diet.
Obviously, a lot of hair loss is caused by hormone-related issues and also drug-related issues as in people with chemotherapy, et cetera. They will have a side effect of the body shedding hair through the drug-related treatments they have. Most women over 40 will also start to thin their hair at a primitive menopause age, but that is quite common in a lot of women. This isn't a product or a drug-related product that is going to work on that.
But what we know for sure is that there are a lot of women out there with unhealthy scalps that are obviously having issues with their hair because they've got too much chemical build up and it's the same with skin products.
We have to be aware of what's going on in the product and what's necessary. What we have to do is deliver the promise, which is something I’ve done my whole life with the clients that I work on.
Why create products targeting Asian hair specifically?
I am interested in developing products that work for our customer who happens to be Asian. I've been using products for years that were developed in the West for Western hair that really don't really suit Asians, in my professional opinion. Sometimes certain products and ranges have been successful but as a complete range of products for Asian hair? They just don't exist.
We've got products in Korea, products from Japan, and you could say, yes, they’re Asian, but they're full of silicones and they don't have the climate that we do here. So, obviously, things are going to react differently.
What I know for sure is that the Western counterpart has finer hair and a drier scalp, and most products, as you can see in the advertising, talk about the hair. They make statements about all these magic things inside the shampoo that affect their hair. But what we've developed for the first part of our new range is a scalp cleanser because we attach that to the scalp and we attach the second part to the hair, so we split the scalp and the hair.
How would you recommend one to use the product?
Continued use; you will get more obviously more cleansing than just the first time. What I recommend is to perhaps alternate it. Use my deep cleansing product, perhaps once or twice a week and then go on using other products, and you might find that that works for you.
But I think everybody's different. If you want to have smooth, shiny hair with just a shampoo, then you're going to have a sticky scalp. So with my product, you do need to use the conditioning treatment afterwards. If you just shampoo that by itself and you have long hair, it won't close the cuticle.
Tell us about the research and development process for this range.
We started off on this project 10 years ago, but unfortunately at the time, my lack of knowledge in the product industry and difficulty to find a research chemist that was able to develop something unique and special that wasn't existing in a standard formula made it hard. I tried all these formulas and I said, “This is nothing different.”
So what I did was search high and low for a unique group of chemists, and I happened to be in Italy when we developed a new type of product that I felt was necessary to use in our salon for my client.
I never thought about going into the market and making it in a commercial way to use at home. I just wanted to have something we could use in the salon that would cleanse all the sprays, oil, dirt and dust and get everything out of the hair and the scalp at the same time.
What kind of tests did you conduct to ensure that these products work?
In the beginning, we were testing everything in Europe and it seemed to be fine. But then I brought it back to Hong Kong and Singapore, and I got a negative result. So I figured that we had to do the testing here.
With my friends and my celebs, I got loads of people in important places willing to be the guinea pigs. Obviously, we didn't test on the clients, but I had a whole group of women – some in Singapore and some in Hong Kong – that gave me really positive feedback about certain things and what they really wanted.
I have learnt in life that if you want to work in any industry, you need to listen to what the customer wants. So this was developed by Asia's most discerning women.
How has haircare changed over the years?
Most women today are working and they don't have time to spend in the salon or at home, so they really want something that works for them. I think that the future is all about doing things at home because people now talk on social media and the media reports on things like this.
There is a big movement toward DIY. Things are changing for the younger generation of girls with long hair. You should be treating your hair at least once a week if you got super long hair. It’s really what you do need, especially if you're shampooing it every day. So we developed this range as something you can easily use at home. You will be getting the same quality product that we use professionally.
Are you planning to formulate any more haircare products to follow this range?
A range for coloured hair. One of the biggest problems when it comes to coloured hair is fading. It doesn't last because the cleansing products remove the colour from the hair over a period of time. But this particular product that I'm going to come out with is going to make the colour last so much longer because you've got no foaming suds at all. And it does clean the hair and scalp.
