If your dad isn’t the first person you’d consult for a solution to your most frustrating frizzy hair problems, then clearly your dad is not a biochemist. And he definitely isn't Boyce Clark, a single father and scientist with a PhD in biogeochemistry who decided to take his 12-year-old daughter’s struggle with frizz into his own hands — to bestselling result.
Clark and his daughter, Alden, live in Baton Rouge, LA, where temperatures run high and monumental levels of humidity are the norm. "My daughter’s hair would be okay when she would go to bed and in the morning it would be insane," he told Yahoo Beauty. "The more I would brush it, the bigger it would get, and I would think to myself, Why?"
Determined to get a better handle on the situation, the father-daughter duo tried countless over-the-counter treatments to no avail. (Clark ruled out keratin straightening treatments for the safety risks related to formaldehyde.) Through his extensive research, he concluded that frizz is caused by irregularities in the hair's outer layer, which allow moisture in the air (i.e. humidity) to disperse into each strand, causing it to swell.
Clark started experimenting with potential formulas in the kitchen, with his KitchenAid mixer no less. After almost a year of trial and error, they landed on something that worked. "As I was conducting my research, I kept coming across statements such as ‘to increase the lubricity of your hair, you should use silk proteins,’” Clark said. “Lubricity is a real engineering term which means ‘to reduce friction.’”
And so Lubricity Handcrafted Hair Therapy came to be. Clark is the founder and lead cosmetic chemist of the brand, which counts the Penetrate/Encapsulate Treatment as its hero product. “It’s two steps. You apply Step One on dry hair and wait 15 minutes. You do not wash it out. Then, you put on Step Two,” Clark explained. “Those two chemically react to your hair and they are binding to the keratin protein that naturally occurs in your hair, and it’s changing the shape of that keratin slightly.”
The line also includes a shampoo and conditioner, perfect for maintaining the results of the two-step treatment. In case studies, Clark found that because the products are designed to work on the chemistry of the hair, all hair types can benefit from Lubricity, including natural African-American hair texture. It doesn’t flatten your curl pattern — it just improves manageability and adds shine.
According to Clark, Lubricity now sells around 1,600 bottles a day on its online store. It’s a commercial success — and Alden loves it, too. Clark says, “It changed our morning ritual of having 20 minutes of fighting and tears. Now, she just wakes up and goes.”