Beauty entrepreneur Lucy Vincent is changing the way we interact with haircare with the launch of Perpetual, a waterless innovation which redefines sustainability and design.
Armed with a paper bag full of cold-pressed juices and tonics, Lucy Vincent marched into Newmarket salon Stephen Marr with the kind of friendly
She once did, having co-founded the salon in 1994 alongside Stephen Marr, with whom she shares two sons – Billy and Jonny.
Five hair and skin clinics followed a while after, including beauty haven Lucy & The Powder Room occupying the upstairs space at Takapuna’s The Department Store.
The former hairstylist pivoted again in 2007, when she established multi-functional skin, body and hair care brand, Sans Ceuticals.
It’s clear that building brands that last is one of Lucy’s many talents – and her latest venture is one that’s sure to boast timeless appeal.
As she moved towards the station where I was seated, I was reminded of all the times I’d had the pleasure of interviewing her before.
Our in-salon meeting was our second attempt at an interview, but a blow wave and a green juice made for a happy compromise.
We were meeting to discuss Perpetual, the world’s first waterless, 100% recycled, zero-waste hair range that fuses high-performance formulations with eco-conscious design.
The brand’s promise is simple: highly concentrated, refillable haircare in both powder and solid formats that tread lightly on the planet by utilising 100% recycled materials and generate zero waste.
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A hairdresser by trade with a passion for trichology, Lucy developed a haircare line that simplifies the self-selecting process by offering a two-step system that targets common concerns like hair breakage, colour fading but with a priority on scalp microbiome health.
The pH-balanced formulations of the Hair Cleanser, a pH-calibrated cleanser, alongside the Hair Conditioner, a pure, concentrated conditioner, are designed to not disrupt the hair cuticle, with suite of nourishing ingredients geared towards boosting hair health and promoting a balanced scalp.
A teaspoon-sized amount of the Hair Cleanser is all that’s required – the biosphere technology can be activated with the water in the shower, simply smooth between palms to emulsify into a creamy milk to apply to hair.
The Hair Conditioner (available in light or rich) highlights an advanced peptide technology which works in a similar away to bond-building hair treatments by relinking and rebonding the internal hair fibre, and can be smoothed directly onto mid-lengths and ends.
“Perpetual is the result of years of innovation, rethinking beauty from the ground up: no water, no waste, and no trade-offs,” Lucy says.
“Just beautiful, highly functional, future-forward products designed to integrate seamlessly into everyday rituals.”
Sans Ceuticals current hair care offering includes its pH + Shine Corrector, but Lucy says all three can be used together in what she calls a “universal trio” – a robust haircare routine that suitable for all hair types.
Lucy’s latest launch builds on the momentum Sans Ceuticals has amassed over the past two decades, gaining traction in both Aotearoa and driving multi-functional formulations on a world stage.
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One of the country’s original pioneers of the slow beauty movement, Lucy’s holistic focus has honed the vision for Sans Ceuticals and staying true to her North Star has seen the brand welcomed into the fold at retail juggernaut Mecca, as well as partner with day spas including Hana, or premium hotel connections like Hotel Britomart.
Waterless beauty isn’t new, but Lucy says the technology in this field has moved ahead in leaps and bounds in recent years.
While the majority of beauty products contain between 70-90% water, Perpetual eschews water entirely, producing formulas that don’t require preservatives for stability or drain the use of a global resource under stress.
The challenge lay in developing packaging that could withstands the demands of keeping a powder dry and protected in a wet, moist environment - promising an elevated user experience that was more sophisticated than what came before.
“I wanted to start with haircare because that’s where I saw the opportunity in terms of formulation potential within that waterless space,” Lucy says.
More than this, she wanted to shift consumers’ relationship with the products, creating an object of desire to be cherished and reused, time and time again.
She credits Lindy Woodhead’s War Paint: Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein - Their Lives, Their Time, Their Rivalry as sparking inspiration to want to shift the way consumer interact with a product.
“Since the 1950s, we’ve been accustomed to purchasing a beauty product, using it and discarding it. When you actually look at the packaging and think: ”Wow that’s a really beautiful glass container, what has it taken to produce that?“,” she says.
“It’s so deeply ingrained in our mind to think there’s no value in that piece once the product inside it is gone. I wanted to change all that.”
Her deep love of design motivated Lucy to create what she calls an “object you can cherish forever”. It’s for this reason that the canisters come empty in each kit – to promote the perception that its an object, not just a beauty project.
In pursuit of a circular beauty model, every Perpetual canister is made from waste – a mono material crafted from old bottles.
“Most people don’t realise that a number of products don’t get recycled because they have coatings on them or they contain mixed materials. If they can’t be picked apart, they all get discarded in landfill,” she says.
To the untrained eye, each canister seems sculptural, a neutral-toned squircle (square-circle) with no obvious branding.
Trickier still was nailing down the design of the Perpetual Hair Conditioner, a pure, solid concentrate which functions like a refillable deodorant. Earlier iterations were round, and one featured a plastic base plate and spindle hot melted inside.
It was almost the final product until Lucy challenged one of the engineers working on the project to make it completely plastic-free. Three days later, he’d done it.
Both products require the user to stop and engage with the product, whether that’s through dispensing the right amount of shampoo or refilling the conditioner solid. It’s a direct reflection of the kind of value shift Lucy is driving in the beauty space.
“We are on autopilot with everything in a really tapped out, unconscious way. But when you have to pay attention, you become more present,” Lucy says.
“[Applying Perpetual] is slightly meditative in a way, and it brings so much more value to how you perceive it.”
The entrepreneur says developing Perpetual was one of the hardest things she’s ever done, calling the project “an exercise in sheer grit and determination.”
In a world where white labelling – or the process by which brands can “buy” perceivably innovative products off the shelf and label it as their own – is rife, Lucy says there’s a certain level of pride that comes with creating something no one knew was possible.
“We had two problems. We had waterless products and particularly a powder that needed to exist in a wet, damp space, and then we needed to create packaging that would protect that and be really user-friendly and perform really well. So the two had to work together,” she says.
“And every time you would refine one thing, then that would change the game for the other. Quite often we would meet dead-end road, after spending a good six months exploring that and putting money into that to realise that that’s not going to work.”
The self-proclaimed optimist says it was her close friends that motivated her to keep pushing on.
“You have to have this kind of insane optimism to keep the team pushing forward and seeing the vision,” she says.
“In steering that ship and then going down another potentially dead-end road, but each time you’re making progress because you’re gaining more knowledge.”
In time, Lucy aims for Perpetual to act as a blueprint of sorts for the industry to uncover better ways of producing haircare.
“There’s plenty of space for lots of brands to be doing this. The more people that are interacting with these novel technologies, the better,” she says.
“We need to change the way we think and interact with beauty. My dream would be for it become mainstream to have a system like this. For it to become the norm to have something you cherish and look after without discarding.”
That dream extends to user experience, too, and Lucy’s hope for Perpetual is that consumers view haircare differently - treating it as an opportunity to slow down and be present.
“It’s not simply a functional act in the morning,” she says. “It’s a moment to be grateful and take care of yourself.”
Perpetual is priced at $129 for a kit (canister and refill) and $79 for refills only. Available now exclusively from Sansceuticals.com.
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