Braiding hair is coming to Sephora, and a Black-owned brand is leading it in. Ruka Hair launches on Sephora's US site on August 4, followed by a rollout into ten stores across New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta on August 14. With it, Ruka becomes the first Black-owned hair-extensions brand Sephora has ever carried, and the first extensions brand of any kind the retailer has stocked in more than twenty years.
Ruka was founded by Tendai Moyo and Ugo Agbai and built in London, where it earned a following and a place on the shelves of premium retailers like Selfridges before making this US debut. The pitch was never just a product. It was the idea that the hair Black women wear every day deserves the same research, design, and retail respect as anything else in prestige beauty.
The centerpiece is Synths, Ruka's patent-pending, collagen-based fiber built as an alternative to the plastic kanekalon that has dominated the category for decades. It is engineered to move, hold a curl, and mimic natural hair without the itch, the tangling, or the environmental cost of traditional synthetic hair. The Sephora assortment pairs Ruka's Synths-squared braiding hair with styling products and hair perfumes.
“Braiding hair is one of the most culturally central products in beauty, and it has spent decades in the beauty-supply aisle rather than on the prestige floor. That just changed.”
Why this lands: extensions and braiding hair are among the most-used, most culturally rooted products in all of beauty, and for generations they have lived in the beauty-supply aisle, rarely owned by the communities that buy them. A Black-owned brand setting the standard on Sephora's floor moves the category, and the ownership behind it, somewhere it has never been.
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