I'm a Colourist. Here's Why I Made a Detangling Brush.
- Jun 30
- 3 min read
People always expect the first product from a hairdresser to be a shampoo or a treatment, something that lives in the shower and smells expensive. A brush was not what anyone was expecting, including me at first, but the more time I spent behind the chair the more obvious it became that the brush was causing more avoidable damage than anything else in my clients' routines.
The problem I kept seeing at the basin
Colour treated hair is my specialism. Most of my clients are lightened, many are in extensions, and all of them are handling hair that is more fragile than it looks. The single most common source of mechanical damage I see is not heat, it is not the wrong product and it is not technique at the salon. It is brushing at home with the wrong tool.
Breakage at the mid-length. Tangling around extension bonds. Frizz that should not be there. A lot of what clients come in describing as damage is mechanical damage from a brush that was not designed for their hair type. When I ask what brush they use, the answer is almost always something they picked up because it looked nice or because it was on offer.
Why a brush and not something else
You use your brush every single day, probably more than once. Of all the tools in your routine the brush has the most contact time with your hair, which means if it is the wrong brush the impact compounds daily. A good serum or treatment can rescue a lot of things in a hair care routine, but nothing else in your kit can undo what the wrong brush is doing over time.
A shampoo makes sense as a first product from a brand perspective. But from a hair health perspective, the brush is where most of the damage actually starts. I would rather fix that first.
What I needed it to do: the brief for an extension safe, anti breakage detangling brush
I spent a long time being specific about what the brush had to do before I would put my name on it. It needed to be extension safe, meaning the bristle spacing and flexibility would not drag at a bond or a weft. It needed to work on colour treated hair without the stiff bristle resistance that causes breakage on already compromised strands. And it needed to handle a detangling pass on fine hair without creating the kind of friction that makes fine hair brittle and dull over time.
That is not a complicated brief but it is a precise one. Most brushes do one of those things reasonably well. I needed one that did all three consistently, on real hair, in real conditions.
Why it has taken time to get here
Because getting a detangling brush right is not fast. The bristle flex, the spacing, the cushion base, the weight and balance of the handle: all of it affects how the brush performs on different hair types in everyday use. I tested it on clients in the salon, across different hair types, extension methods and colour histories, before I was satisfied that it did what it was supposed to do without creating new problems in the process.
The brush is nearly here. If you want to know what to look for in a detangling brush for your specific hair type, whether that is extensions, colour treated hair or hair prone to breakage, we have put a full guide together: How to Choose a Brush That Won't Wreck Your Hair.
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