The hair catastrophe that built Apotecari
Our founder Simone recently joined Samara Scott-Hunter and Jen Veivers on the Salon Rising podcast to talk all things hair and scalp wellness. The episode opens with the story most people have never heard: the hair disaster that led her to build the brand.
Here is the short version. During a visit to her salon, Simone’s stylist combined two treatments that were never designed to be used at the same time. Her hair turned to jelly and snapped. She lost most of it, walked out with a pixie cut she hated, and spent months hiding under caps and beanies. She didn’t recognise herself.
That moment taught her two things: hair is tied to identity, for almost everyone, and she had the training to fix it. . Simone is a naturopath, nutritionist, trichologist, and formulator with over twenty years developing supplements for brands already sitting in your bathroom cabinet. So she did what she knew best and went head first into research.
What she found shaped everything Apotecari stands for. The hair supplements on the market were fluff, beauty multivitamins with nothing specific or strong enough to change hair. So she went deeper, studied trichology, and worked backwards from a single question: which nutrients build strong, healthy hair, and how do you deliver enough of them to see a real difference?
Here’s the highlight reel from the episode with all the details:
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Your hair is not alive. Once a strand leaves the scalp, nothing you eat repairs it.. Topical care protects what is already there while your body grows better hair from the root. This is why Simone treats the scalp and the strand as two separate jobs, and why a healthy scalp changes what grows next.
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Your body deprioritises your hair. Hair and scalp are the first place your body pulls nutrients from when supply runs short, because it saves them for functions it considers more important. Building strong hair means giving your body more than enough.
Your scalp ages 7xfaster than the skin on your face. Most women spend big on serums for their face and nothing on the scalp their hair grows from. Simone explains why that needs to change. -
Real results take time and consistency. Hair works on a three-month cycle. Simone is direct about the 90-day commitment: take before and after photos, measure your elasticity and porosity, and give it time. This is a supplement, not a headache tablet.
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Shedding and hair loss are not the same thing. The symptom changes what you do next. Shedding is often temporary and tied to a trigger. Hair loss follows a pattern and needs a different response. Simone explains how to tell them apart, and which is the first step to fixing either.
She also talks candidly about perimenopause and hair loss. So many women notice shedding, thinning and a scalp that shows through, then get told it is nothing or imagined. Simone connects it back to what else is shifting in the body, and confirms what a lot of women already suspect: it is real, and it is connected. She draws the same line for shedding after rapid weight loss, including weight loss injections, a trigger most people never think to link to their hair.
Running underneath the whole conversation is her frustration with the noise. New brands appear every week, some with formulas that do very little and a few that are outright unsafe. Her answer is a smaller range that does more. Less noise, more evidence, and a founder with the passion and expertise to back it up.
If you have ever felt dismissed about your hair, or spent money on products that promised everything and changed nothing, this one will land. It is a founder conversation with two salon owners who have seen every version of a hair catastrophe, so expect straight talk and real depth.
Listen to Simone on Salon Rising, Episode 86, wherever you get your podcasts.
