K18’s co-founder and CEO Suveen Sahib on hair longevity and the new Future IQ serum

Lifestyle

Suveen Sahib held up what looked, on screen, like a small dark cloud, and told me it weighed about as much as a ponytail. It was a bundle of roughly 19,000 strands of hair, the median amount K18 says its testers retained after three months of using Future IQ, the brand’s newly launched scalp serum, and it was the kind of visual that made an otherwise dense conversation about follicle biology suddenly land somewhere personal. Sahib is the Co-Founder and CEO of K18, the hair care brand that built its name on molecular repair, and speaking to him it became clear the company sees repair less as an end point and more as the groundwork for something bigger. “Repair was never the destination,” he said. “It was a foundation. And once we proved we could reverse damage at the molecular level, the next question was obvious: how do we stop that damage accumulating in the first place.”

That question is what led K18 toward longevity, a word borrowed from skincare that Sahib believes hair care is only now catching up to. His argument is that hair, scalp and follicle do not operate as separate systems any more than a tree can be separated from its hydrogen peroxide, which is what eventually pushes healthy hair into a resting phase, disrupts the scalp barrier, and interferes with the enzyme responsible for producing melanin. “Hair is not hair to us the way it is to biology,” he said. “It becomes energy consuming, and the body shuts it down to preserve energy for everything else.”

For the Middle East specifically, Sahib sees a market that is, in his words, one of the most sophisticated luxury beauty consumer bases in the world sitting inside one of the harshest climates for hair, between prolonged heat, dry air, constant air conditioning and the water quality. “It’s not just one thing,” he said. “It’s the prolonged heat cycles, the dry climate, the minerals in the water, the air conditioning, the frequent styling, all of it is increasing that oxidative load.” When I brought up oiling, a ritual so embedded in daily life across the region and in South Asia that it barely registers as a beauty step, he agreed it roots and soil, and that shedding, scalp devitalization and early greying, three things women often describe to him as unrelated frustrations, are actually different symptoms of interconnected biological processes. “These were not three different isolated problems,” he said. “They were simply a different expression of what was happening in the same underlying biology.”

He walked me through it using an image that stuck, describing every biochemical reaction in the body as an electron trying to make its way down an expressway towards becoming water, and describing stress, heat styling, pollution, and sun exposure as the traffic that piles up behind it. During biological stress, the excess electrons turn into helps but pointed out something most people never consider, that the oil itself oxidizes under enough environmental stress, working against the very scalp it is meant to protect. “The challenge is the oil itself gets oxidized,” he said. It is why K18 built Future IQ around what Sahib calls an orchestration of technologies rather than a single hero ingredient, comparing it to a symphony where no one instrument matters if the rest are out of tune.

Results gathered after three months of nightly use, ahead of the launch, showed nearly all testers reporting less shedding, more than half noticing improved scalp vitality, and over 70 per cent seeing fewer greys, though he was careful to note that outcomes shift with age and individual biology, and that someone further along in graying should expect the product to slow things down rather than reverse them entirely. The serum itself is designed to slip into an existing evening routine rather than add a new one, four applications spread across the scalp rather than the hair itself, left on overnight alongside a regular skincare regimen. “It’s not going to interfere with your styling,” Sahib said. “It may feel a little wet, but it dries very fast. It’s as simple as that.” “It may give you a superficial feeling of improved hair density,” he said, “but it’s not really happening up there.” What he wants, more than anything, is for hair to be protected the way skin already is, well before the damage becomes something you can see in the mirror.