The global beauty industry is on the brink of a profound cultural reckoning.
Propelled by the combination of post-pandemic consumers’ heightened interest in self care and a new wave of trailblazing brand founders distinctly positioned to meet these evolving needs, Indian-inspired beauty and the alternative medicine system of Ayurveda are reaching — and resonating with — a wider global audience than ever before.
At the core of many of the brands leading the charge (which include Prakti Beauty, Fable and Mane, Ranavat, Live Tinted, LilaNur Parfums and supplement brand Taza Ayurveda, to name a few) is a dedication to not just creating products but sharing stories. So, too, is a carefully crafted East-meets-West sensibility intended to not only make long-held Indian traditions more universally approachable, but in many cases to reflect their founders’ own multifaceted identities.
Take Pritika Swarup’s Prakti Beauty, for example. Founded in 2021 by the Virginia-born model and Columbia University graduate, the brand aims to blend the “cultural richness and spirituality of India with contemporary energies and technologies.”
This hybrid concept is represented in each facet of Prakti Beauty, from the brand’s name — a mashup of “Pritika” and “Shakti,” which mean “beloved one” and “female power” in Hindu, respectively — to its formulas, which present Indian skin care staples like rice, vetiver and ashwagandha in a way that is accessible and understandable to anyone, in part through the brand’s educational ingredient and lifestyle blog The Priti Edit.
“We’re all hybrids in a way, we’re all multidimensional; as an Indian American, [Prakti Beauty] is about championing my culture, but in a way that feels fresh and is relatable to the women in my generation,” says Swarup, whose product lineup spans facial cleansers, exfoliators and treatments costing between $38 and $56, and which will soon be joined by a first-time foray into makeup.
To further Prakti Beauty’s commitment to uplifting Indian culture (and its originators), Swarup developed the Suman Saroj Initiative. Named after both of her grandmothers, the program employs local craftswomen in Lucknow, India, who create hand-embroidered accessories, such as shawl-like headscarves called dupattas, available for sale on the Prakti Beauty website.
“Living in America, it can be very easy to, I guess you could say, lose your culture,” said Swarup, whose yogi mother not only played a pivotal role in shaping the founder’s understanding of beauty and wellness from a young age but also made sure to carve out annual family trips to Lucknow to ensure Swarup would grow up immersed in her roots.
“Ayurveda can seem very intimidating and complicated and we want to change that; it’s about taking what works for you and incorporating that into your life, not necessarily adopting the entire wellness system,” Swarup says.
One of the oldest traditional systems of medicine in existence, Ayurveda is derived from the Sanskrit terms “ayer,” meaning “life,” and “veda,” which means “knowledge.” Ayurveda emphasizes the interconnectedness of one’s mental, physical and spiritual states and promotes balanced lifestyle choices and rituals as a means to living healthily and preventing and treating diseases.
According to data from Verified Market Research, the global Ayurvedic market is projected to reach $21.12 billion by 2028, up from $6.5 billion in 2020.
“We don’t compete with traditional Western medicine; rather, we feel Ayurveda can be a great complement to it,” explains Ayurvedic expert Ananta Ripa Ajmera, who has been enlisted by luxury New York wellness club The Well to serve as its adviser of Ayurveda since 2019.
In her position at The Well, Ripa Ajmera works alongside experts in traditional Chinese medicine, functional medicine, physical therapy and other practices to co-conceptualize comprehensive and synergistic approaches to help guests feel their best.
“It’s been amazing to create an integrative wellness space for practitioners of different modalities to come together, and to see people of all walks become interested in Ayurveda,” says Ripa Ajmera, who is on year 12 of what she describes as a “lifelong” study of Ayurveda.
Equally committed to spreading knowledge as she is to her pursuit of it, Ripa Ajmera has hosted educational sessions and trainings on Ayurveda at the Stanford School of Medicine, as well as for California probation officers in an aim to help them cope with job-related stress. She ultimately envisions a future in which it is typical for certified practitioners to teach Ayurvedic principles in schools, senior care centers and other such spaces beyond the archetypal wellness center.
And she’s not the only one who believes a widespread embrace of Ayurveda could fundamentally alter people’s quality of life at any age — Divya Viswanathan and Amy Engel also aim to guide people to and through the landscape via their supplement brand Taza Ayurveda, which harnesses ancestral Indian herbs like valerian root, licorice root and cardamom seed to support stress reduction, digestion, focus, memory and sleep.
“We see Ayurvada becoming an officially recognized form of medicine [in the U.S.] as our north star,” says Viswanathan, who grew up in Bombay and moved to the U.S. when she was 17 to attend college, where she befriended Engel.
A bottle of 60 Taza capsules of any variety retails for $60. To ensure authentic formulation, the brand has partnered with Sitaram Ayurveda, a Kerala, India-based institution that formulates natural supplements and remedies approved by the the Indian government’s Ministry of Ayush. From there, Engel and Viswanathan make a few formulaic tweaks to account for lifestyle differences among Western consumers (such as meat intake) in order to maximize the supplements’ efficacy.
Mainly popular among consumers ages 45 and up, each Taza supplement specifies how it might impact one’s dosha, which is a health state determined by an individual’s unique balance of the five elements of Ayurvedic medicine: Aakash (Space), Jala (Water), Prithvi (Earth), Teja (Fire) and Vayu (Air).
The three doshas are Vata, Pitta and Kapha, and each designates distinctive personal strengths and weaknesses that indicate what lifestyle shifts one may need to implement in order to attain optimal health.
Founder of the Santa Monica-based Surya Spa, Martha Soffer says she can tell a client’s dosha simply by checking their pulse.
“If I take your pulse, I can tell you many things about your body,” says Soffer, who has been running Surya for more than 30 years and who has amassed a high-profile client base, including Gwyneth Paltrow. “I can see if you have too much Vata, too much Pitta or too much Kapha, and know what herbs you need to take, and what foods you need to remove from your diet.”
Though mainly known for her prowess in Panchakarma, which is a detoxification treatment that lasts between seven and 21 days during which Soffer cooks personalized meals for a client and creates for them a tailored daily regimen to balance their dosha, Surya also offers a variety of massages, sound baths, yoga classes and more. Prices start at $200 for a 60-minute breathwork class. A seven-day, all-inclusive Panchakarma retreat costs upward of $9,000.
Soffer also helms an in-house product line, which includes face and body oils and creams; a Kourtney Kardashian Barker-approved Fertility Steam that taps raspberry leaf and Egyptian chamomile with the goal of helping the body prepare for pregnancy; bath soaks; tongue scrapers, and much more.
In fact, a recent trip to the farmer’s market serendipitously spurred her latest concoction: “They’re nectarine flowers,” says Soffer, lifting a large jar of pink petals suspended in liquid from her desk. “I walked past and was fascinated by the smell. I’m making a new oil with them; they bring sweetness into your heart.”
Just like rituals and textures, smell is an indispensable avenue through which Ayurveda finds deliverance. Just ask Paul Austin, a longtime fragrance industry veteran who completed meaningful stints at Givaudan and Quest yet pinpoints his six-month sabbatical spent in Coimbatore, India, as the most pivotal juncture of his career.
“In the mornings, I would go to school where I was studying Ayurveda, and I would follow these very elegant South Indian ladies who would have jasmine in their hair,” recalls Austin. “It was that jasmine; the smell made me realize I was in a perfumer’s garden of Eden.”
Struck by a keen appreciation for India’s fragrance culture — and galvanized to share it with the world — it was years later that Austin became connected with Anita Lal, founder of the well known Indian home and apparel company Good Earth, and Austin’s soon-to-become LilaNur Parfums co-creator.
“Fragrance has always been a passion for me,” says Lal, a daughter of two Pakistani refugees who grew up near Bombay and now resides in Delhi. “From the time I was a little girl, the scent of rose, of jasmine — these things delighted me beyond belief. I felt it was time someone from India bring to the world fragrances as we smell them here.”
Launched in 2021, LilaNur offers seven eau de parfums retailing for $285 each, and three attars (which are highly concentrated, alcohol-free perfume oils that cost $435 each), all naturally extracted from India and blended in Grasse, France.
In a big win (and something of a full-circle moment) for Indian-founded and -inspired fragrance brands, LilaNur debuted at Bergdorf Goodman, where nearly 20 years prior in 2004, Bombay-born Shalini Kumar’s Shalini Parfum also made its debut.
The path to establishing Indian-inspired brands’ place in the prestige channel has been far from straightforward in the years since, though, with few of them managing to establish footholds in the retail sector.
Recent breakthroughs from brands like Ranavat and Fable and Mane, however, could indicate that Indian-inspired beauty’s time in the spotlight may be here at last and could endure.
Mere months after the Ayurvedic hair care brand’s initial launch in 2020, Fable and Mane went TikTok viral and became the first South Asian-owned hair care brand to enter Sephora. Founded by London-born siblings Nikita and Akash Mehta, the brand entered the market with a $36 pre-wash hair oil incorporating ashwagandha, castor oil and a 10-herb blend called dashmool that aims to promote hair and scalp health. The brand has since been building out a comprehensive regimen inclusive of shampoos, conditioners and serums.
“Beauty always brought people together in our household — that’s something so integral to Indian culture,” says Nikita, who recalls sitting with her grandmother for routine hair oilings and scalp massages as a child, a ritual she remembers being best accompanied by storytelling and rich conversation (hence the name, Fable and Mane).
Data from Circana shows that sales of hair oils in the U.S. prestige market have grown 14 percent year-over-year, reaching $166 million as consumers become increasingly aware of the practice’s benefits to hair health. Google search data provider, Spate, too, has tracked a 12.4 percent YoY increase in searches for “Ayurvedic oil,” and a 31.8 percent increase in those for “amla hair oil.”
“Whenever my grandma used to talk about beauty, it was about the foods we ate, it was about what we put on our skin — it was never superficially about what we saw in the mirror,” says Akash, adding that the brand, imbued with their grandmother’s teachings, entered Selfridges in London as well as India’s leading cosmetics retailer Nykaa last year.
Ayurvedic skin and hair care brand Ranavat is also growing its reach, having recently entered Sephora, Goop and Harrods.
“I think sometimes people feel that culturally driven brands maybe should be more mass, and I want to challenge the way people think and define the word luxury,” says founder Michelle Ranavat, who offers a range of facial serums, massage tools, candles, hair oils and more. “I shop at Sephora, I’m a city girl; I want to feel like these products and rituals deserve to have a spot in the modern world beyond just the bottom shelf of Indian grocery stores.”
For Deepica Mutyala, the beauty-influencer-turned-Live-Tinted-founder who went viral in 2015 for demonstrating how one can mask under-eye hyperpigmentation using red lipstick (and now helms a skin and makeup brand which focuses on hyperpigmentation as a key concern), founding an inclusive and culturally driven brand was just as much a means to ending generational trauma as it was to showcasing generations-old traditions.
“I grew up in a world where I would hide under an umbrella because I didn’t want to get darker, because I knew that fair was considered beautiful — there literally was a skin bleaching cream on my mom’s bathroom counter called Fair and Lovely,” recalls Mutyala, adding that her adolescent years saw her transition through bleached blonde hair, blue contacts, and anything else she could try that her younger self thought would comply with the singular standard of beauty peddled to her at the time.
“The goal of what Live Tinted is trying to do is to change the narrative around colorism — it’s literally in the name,” says Mutyala, whose hero skus include the Superhue Hyperpigmentation Serum Stick and multipurpose, color-correcting Huesticks, which retail for $34 and $24, respectively.
Having long since shed any shame regarding her skin tone and culture, Mutyala now channels that memory into a source of creative renewal for launches like Live Tinted’s new invisible chemical SPF stick. “It goes back to honoring that little girl who sat under an umbrella; it’s kind of my way of saying, ‘Go out into the sun — embrace it.'”