ROOTED - Olusola Idowu

Autor: Olusola Idowu

Editorial: Riding Mill Press

Año: 01/10/2026

ISBN: 9781066996537

Encuadernación: Tapa blanda

Páginas: 260 pp.

Idioma: eng

EAN: 9781066996537

Why do no two heads of hair behave the same way, even with the same products?
You have probably asked that question. Standing in the bathroom with a drawer full of products that half-work or watching the shampoo that transformed your sister?s hair sit flat and dull on yours. The haircare industry has been quietly hoping you would stop asking.
Hair is not a beauty product. It is biology. Every strand on your head is a thread of protein, made by a follicle in your scalp, wrapped in a cuticle of oil, and shaped by the genes you inherited from a particular corner of the world. Hair from East Asia, hair from Europe, and hair from sub-Saharan Africa are not three styles. They are three different biological structures, with three different chemistries, three different vulnerabilities, and three different needs.
Rooted is the book that explains why, and what the real science of textured hair, the follicle, and the scalp actually says.
For thirty years, the dominant way of thinking about hair has been a chart drawn up in the 1990s by a celebrity hairstylist. Fourteen numbered categories, no underlying biology, no published evidence base, and now used by almost every haircare brand you have heard of. It was never built to be a science. It is the science the industry uses anyway.
Olusola Idowu PhD, an AI scientist and founder of a Newcastle biotech laboratory, has spent fourteen years inside the global cosmetics industry, watching the gap between what the research knows and what the shelf delivers for textured-haired consumers. Rooted is his account of that gap, and the biology that fills it.
Across ten chapters, readers will discover why the Walker scale fits almost nobody properly, and what follicle shape, keratin chemistry, disulfide topology, and cuticle biology actually tell us about how your hair behaves; why hair loss in Black women, including traction alopecia, CCCA, and androgenetic patterns, is systematically misread by clinics still using frameworks built on straight hair; why the scalp microbiome, the most under-studied skin environment on the body, controls more of your hair health than any product in your bathroom; and why heat, tension, and chemistry damage your fibre on timescales most people never see.
At the heart of the book is the Inflammation Paradox, an original scientific framework explaining why the same biology that protects melanin-rich skin from photoageing leaves the scalp uniquely vulnerable to inflammation and scarring, published here for the first time.
Written in the voice of a brilliant friend who happens to be a scientist and a father, Rooted is rigorous without being cold and personal without losing the evidence. Every claim is grounded in peer-reviewed research and original laboratory work, including the formulation science behind the author?s own Pure Beauty Award-winning haircare brand.
The author brings rare authority to the subject. His research has been downloaded more than thirty-one thousand times and sits in the top five per cent of all tracked science. He founded an award-winning AI ingredient-discovery platform and gave evidence to the UK Parliament on AI-driven personalised skincare and haircare for melanin-rich and textured-hair populations.
Rooted is the second book in the landmark trilogy on the biology we share and the differences that matter: Melanin, Rooted, and Ageing.
Read it, and you will never look at your hair, your scalp, or the industry that sells to them, the same way again.
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