‘Hair Longevity’ Products Go to Great Lengths To Keep Hair Healthy as You Age

From you shampoo to your showerhead and beyond.

Fun fact: The skin on your scalp ages faster than the skin anywhere else on your body—and the effects are written all over your strands. While multi-step skin-care routines prioritize longevity by smoothing, brightening, and tightening, such a focus hasn’t extended to the hair on our head. Come 2024, though, prepare to rethink your hair-care routine with longevity in mind, thanks to the help of a slew of new product launches that aim to keep hair as healthy as possible—for as long as possible.

The last three years of hair innovations have focused on nourishing our scalps with skin-care-infused formulas and regrowing our strands in the wake of pandemic-induced hair loss. But all of these solutions target your current hair needs instead of looking to the future. That’s about to change. “We’ve seen a lot of women going through hair thinning, especially after COVID, and just accepting it because we’re all so programmed to think that having fine or brittle hair is just a part of aging,” says Sofia Baig, a hair-care expert and the lead trichologist for Monpure, a brand that launched in 2020 and focuses on scalp health. “There are so many treatments out there [to stave off the effects of visible skin aging], but what about hair care?”

To understand the importance of hair wellness in the context of longevity, it’s key to first understand what happens to the hair as we age and why. “The scalp ages more quickly than the skin on your body, because we’re applying products and using heat and chemicals on the hair,” says Baig. She says other factors, including genetics, diet, exercise, and other lifestyle habits—essentially anything connected to causing inflammation¹—can also impact how your hair ages. Additionally, research has shown that oxidative stress²—which happens as a result of free radical damage from things like pollution, sun exposure, and hard water and keeps your cells from functioning properly—can significantly speed up the hair aging process by compromising your hair strands before they even break the surface of your scalp.