Over the last few years, the drugstore skin-care aisle has gotten a glow up, and it’s become easier than ever to shop for products with clean ingredients, sustainable packaging, and inclusive marketing at an accessible price point. But the hair-care aisle? Not so much. Even now, hair-care products that check all of those same boxes often still come at a luxury price point. But with the launch of her new beauty brand, Anomaly, actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas is out to change that.
“I remember being told when I was a teenager with really long, waist-length hair that all the good, clean, sustainable, vegan products were outside of our budget. We’ve suddenly made strides in skin care with affordable, clean products, but in hair care, those products are still so expensive,” says Chopra Jonas. “When I decided to get into beauty, I wanted to find the gap in the market, and to me, this gap was this trifecta of having an affordable beauty line with the type of superior formulas that you can usually only find in the double digits that is also environmentally conscious.”
Anomaly, which launched earlier this month at Target, offers a range of products that hit on all three of these elements and retail for only $6. It’s made from sustainable packaging, natural, clean ingredients, and includes three shampoos (gentle, clarifying, and hydrating), three conditioners (shine, smoothing, and volumizing), a hair mask, and a dry shampoo. The formulations are powered by natural ingredients like rosemary, eucalyptus, and charcoal, which draw on Chopra Jonas’s Indian heritage. “Indian hair care has a lot of Ayurveda, which uses a lot of plant-based elements,” she says. “The spirit of that is definitely within the inspiration of these products and the vegan ingredients we use.”
As someone who has what she calls an “intimate relationship” with her hair, it was important to Chopra Jonas that her line provides everyone with the tools they need to develop that sort of relationship to their own hair. “My intimate relationship isn’t with the hair that’s done by experts when I’m sitting in the hair and makeup chair, but rather with my real-life hair when I’ve washed it and air dried it and am sitting at home,” she says. “The experience of hair wash day and the confidence you feel on a good hair day versus a bad hair day is a really big part of the brand because it’s really important to have that intimate connection with what your natural hair feels like when it’s the best version of what it can be.”
With that in mind, all of Anomaly’s marketing materials feature women—including Chopra Jonas herself—with their natural hair. “I know when I do advertising for beauty products, it’s after I sit in a chair for two hours to get my hair to look that silky and gorgeous, and I wanted to break that myth,” she says. “This is a natural hair-care brand for everyday people. I wanted to show that if you have a great foundation with your natural hair, you can build on that and do whatever you want with your [styling].”
The fact that Chopra Jonas is able to offer her products at a $6 price point is something she says she is “really proud of.” Packaging tends to play a major role in the prices consumers pay for their products, and the actress focused on finding sustainable, affordable packaging so that the majority of the brand’s resources could go into product development. “We spend so little because we’ve used recycled materials from oceans and landfills—our caps literally cost three cents each,” says Chopra Jonas. “Which means we have so much money left in our budget to focus on having really great ingredients and superior formulas.”
As the actress herself puts it: “To see a brand in the hair-care aisle that checks all of these boxes, that’s unisex, isn’t preaching about what label you fit into, and doesn’t make a hole in your wallet or the environment—I think that’s going to be an anomaly in itself.”
For the 411 on what your particular hair type needs to live its best and healthiest life, check out the video below.
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