“I honestly think in five years people are going to go, ‘Oh God, remember when we used to wash our hair with shampoo?’” says Michael Gordon. That's a striking statement, given Gordon's own history: He created the famed haircare company Bumble and Bumble in 1977, the spin off product line in 1992, and then in 2006 sold his stake to Estée Lauder. But he isn’t advocating for unwashed hair. He’s explaining Purely Perfect, his new product line that defies just about every expectation most consumers have when it comes to personal hygiene.

The marquee product is a hair cleanser that has no detergents and doesn’t create a foam. Specifically, it’s free of sodium laureth sulfate, a chemical ingredient used in virtually all shampoos because it kills oils and leaves users with a squeaky-clean scalp. Problem is, that also dries out skin and hair follicles—a problem that most people treat by buying, without batting an eye, additional products like conditioners and hair masks. Instead, the Purely Perfect cleansing creme has aloe vera, rose flower oil, evening primrose oil, and peppermint oil. Using it feels nothing like shampoo: Massage the balm into your scalp, through your strands, and rinse it out. That’s it. No lathering, no rinsing, no repeating. And no Bumble and Bumble.

For a certain set of city-dwelling women and their savvy hairdressers, that line became the only shampoo worth buying, and inspired a wave of copycats in the 2000s. There were 14 formulations, and the business insight was to create a series of products that worked best when layered on top one another. Gordon founded the line in the late 1990s after noticing that editorial hairdressers didn’t use any of the products available at the time. “I thought that was odd. Why would the best hairdresser in the world not use Redken, or Paul Mitchell?” the British-born, New York-based Gordon says. “They’d use a lot of grease, French hair care stuff, face creams, they’d use sugar, they’d use soap, a lot of things—but not normal hair products.” His new product also arrived from an insight, about how people live, and what they value that other marketers have simply been blind to.

A $12 Billion Market. With a 'B.' And Just in the U.S.

A few years ago in Austria, Gordon found a crude drugstore item called Less is More. It had far fewer ingredients than most hair cleansers, and it spurred Gordon to pursue an idea he’d toyed with for a while: the “lived in” look, that people will pay so much for, could be accomplished if hair was just minimally treated, with natural ingredients. He took this idea to the lab, and after a few iterations, he had a new non-foaming, detergent-free cleanser. The approach self-consciously echoes food-activist Michael Pollan's maxim, "If you can't say it, don't eat it."

Hair Story

While that idea has now become common in food, it doesn't quite exist yet in many industries. The haircare industry is one of them, and it's massive: In the United States, it pulls in over $12 billion in sales. Even an unscientific survey of the haircare aisle in any basic drugstore will yield a dizzying array of products—shampoo for volume, shampoo for frizz, conditioner for color-treated hair, and so on—all of which are, chemically, about the same. According to Gorden, these brands have little incentive to upset the fundamentals of the product because (1) it’s usually marketers, not hairdressers, working with laboratories on products and (2) sales happen at trade shows, where distributors, not haircare professionals, make deals to put product directly on the shelves of drugstores and retailers. Hairdressers have long known that detergents are bad for hair.

While it doesn't have bacteria in it, Purely Perfect also dovetails with a new pro-bacteria movement that’s slowly percolating in the health and cosmetic sectors. The movement, in capsule form, goes as such: Purell-addicted Americans have been inoculating themselves against germs and bacteria, and thus are fighting against our body’s ability to self-regulate and heal. This trend is seen most visibly in the dairy aisle in the supermarket, where probiotic yogurts have been sprouting up, promising to aid digestion. And a recent story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine chronicles how one Massachusetts-based bio-tech startup is espousing the benefits of using a living bacteria spray in place of soaps. Gordon is careful not to claim any medical or health benefits, but does cheerfully say that some of his own staff have seen their Psoriasis and acne clear up since they began using the Purely Perfect cleanser.

Because the line has three products, not a dozen, and nixes the need for a conditioner, it also cuts down on trash—a fringe benefit that’s key to Gordon. While he won’t reveal specific plans for the near future, he says that the next step for his products will be designed with the goal of eliminating waste entirely.