K18 is leading this revolution already, offering the technology and science that allows people to own their relationship with hair in a new way. The beauty industry up to this point has fallen short on optimizing design and functionality together. When it comes to those concepts, we believe nature is the ultimate engineer. It can strengthen our relationship with beauty and wellness, but it’s also going to fundamentally restructure everything we do and how we interact. So, it got us thinking, how can we take that function made for biology and transfer it to the human system—and more importantly, your hair. 

What’s different about hair that is liberated? The hair we had as kids that has that young texture and bounce? All the elements of our hair environment come together to make that possible—and biomimetics is all about recreating that optimal environment for hair. 

Our peptide employs this theory of biomimetics to restore strength and elasticity to hair. To put it simply: Biomimetics is the practice of learning from and mimicking nature. Mimicking the natural structure of keratin building blocks (amino acid sequences) the K18 bioactive peptide is recognized as natural by the hair, perfectly fitting in and reconnecting broken keratin chains. And because it is the right puzzle piece to reconnect these broken pieces or damage sites, it’s not washed away by water or shampoo like traditional bonding agents. We love an analogy when dealing with the complexities of bioscience, so in case you’re still wondering what this seemingly hair magic is all about read this. 

When building proteins, the order of amino acids determines the kind of protein and its properties, much like the way letters are arranged to make meaningful words and sentences. In the same way the order and where each word sits in a sentence leads to its overall meaning, K18 is the word that refits into the blank in a sentence, integrating itself with the keratin chains as a natural building block. 

Our founder describes discovering this peptide like this: “You have to solve the puzzle, then take the puzzle apart to find that one perfect piece and recreate it. For K18 it wasn’t about finding that magic ingredient. It was about the painstaking biosciences work to recreate that whole puzzle (the way our hair genome expresses keratin), that whole hair environment, to find that one piece that fits.”