Recently I had the privilege of attending Beauty, Business & Belonging, presented by Charlotte Mensah in partnership with the British Beauty Council, as part of an exhibition celebrating Charlotte’s remarkable 40 years in hairdressing.

For me, it was also quite personal. More than a decade ago, Free the Birds worked with Charlotte to create the brand identity for Charlotte Mensah and Manketti Oil. Walking into the exhibition all these years later and seeing that identity still standing loud and proud throughout the space was incredibly special.

But what stayed with me most from the evening was something Charlotte said about the way she has built her business.

She described her approach as “slow beauty”.

It is a phrase that feels particularly significant right now, because at a time where the virality moment and pace is seen as a golden standard in beauty, slow feels like a dirty word.

But it is also why reclaiming ‘slow’ is significant and I think it is evolving into something bigger. It is becoming a philosophy for how beauty businesses themselves are built and in an industry increasingly driven by speed, that may make it more relevant than ever.

From slow product to slow growth

Beauty has become extraordinarily fast, new brands can appear almost overnight. Trends emerge and disappear in weeks – social platforms can turn an ingredient, product or aesthetic into a global phenomenon before many established businesses have had time to respond.

The commercial response is understandable: move faster. Launch more. Extend the range. Find the next audience. Optimise everything. But Charlotte’s approach offers an interesting counterpoint.

She spoke about deliberately building her business over time and resisting the assumption that growth automatically means adding more products.

Her range remains focused. Her ambitions are global. But the path towards them is considered.

That distinction is important.

Slow beauty doesn’t have to mean a lack of ambition. Nor does it mean resisting change. It can mean being more deliberate about where, when and why you grow.

There is confidence in knowing that not every opportunity needs to be pursued and not every trend needs to become a product.

Sometimes the stronger business decision is to go deeper rather than wider.

From audience to community

The evening’s panel, moderated by Millie Kendall OBE, CEO of the British Beauty Council, brought Charlotte together with acclaimed hairstylist Errol Douglas MBE and Antoinette Ale, founder of Tressly.

Their businesses are very different, but there was a common thread running through their stories: none of them started with an audience.

They started with people.

Charlotte began doing hair from home. Her salon, Hair Lounge, was deliberately created to preserve that sense of warmth and welcome. Over time, clients became advocates, collaborators, friends and, in some cases, catalysts for entirely new opportunities.

Errol spoke about the hundreds of people his salons have trained and the responsibility that comes with developing the next generation of talent.

Antoinette described how listening to independent hair professionals has informed the spaces, services and business models Tressly is developing around their needs.

We hear a lot about “building community” in branding today. But perhaps slow beauty offers a useful correction to the language.

That takes time, trust takes time, advocacy takes time and understanding takes time.

Followers can be gained quickly, but belonging cannot be accelerated so easily.

From efficiency to humanity

Inevitably, the conversation turned to AI and technology.

Beauty will undoubtedly be transformed by both, from personalisation and product development to booking systems, consultation and customer experience, there are enormous opportunities to make the industry smarter and more efficient.

But there was also a strong feeling in the room that hairdressing possesses something technology cannot easily replicate.

Human touch.

A relationship between a hairdresser and their client can last decades. During that time, the salon becomes more than somewhere to receive a service. It can become a place for conversation, confidence, advice, reassurance and connection.

One phrase from the evening particularly resonated with me: the salon as an “offline oasis”.

There is an interesting paradox here, the more efficient and automated the world around us becomes, the more valuable genuinely human experiences may feel.

Perhaps this is another way slow beauty is evolving.

It does not have to be anti-technology. Instead, it can ask a more useful question: where should technology make things faster, and where should we deliberately preserve slowness?

A frictionless booking system is valuable.

A frictionless human relationship probably isn’t.

The future may belong to businesses that understand the difference.

From representation to understanding

There is another dimension to slow beauty that Charlotte’s story illustrates particularly well.

Before creating her product range, Charlotte had spent decades working directly with women with Afro and textured hair.

She understood something that the wider beauty market had often failed to recognise.

Her clients were sophisticated consumers buying premium fashion, fragrance and beauty, yet many of the hair products marketed specifically to them did not reflect that world aesthetically or emotionally.

The opportunity was about far more than putting another formulation on shelf.

It was about saying:

You deserve a product created specifically for you and you deserve for it to feel every bit as beautiful, premium and desirable as anything else in the beauty hall.

That understanding was central to the work we created with Charlotte more than a decade ago. Before we started designing, we spent time understanding Charlotte herself: her salon, her clients, Africa, fashion, fragrance, the objects she loved and the visual world she inhabited.

Charlotte recalled during the evening how we asked her to gather objects and references that meant something to her so we could understand the world the brand needed to belong to.

There was no shortcut to that process and perhaps that is another principle of slow beauty worth protecting.

Before creating something for an audience, spend enough time with them to understand what has been missing.

Before designing what a brand should look like, understand what it needs to mean.

From trend to timelessness

Which brings me back to seeing the Charlotte Mensah identity again, branding has its own relationship with speed.

There is always a new aesthetic emerging, a new visual code gaining traction, a new pressure to refresh what already exists.

Some change is necessary. Brands cannot remain frozen while the culture around them moves on, but constant reinvention can also be a sign that there was never a sufficiently strong idea underneath the brand in the first place.

Seeing the identity we created for Charlotte more than a decade ago still feeling completely at home was a reminder that timelessness does not mean creating something neutral enough never to date.

It means finding something true enough to endure.

Charlotte described the identity during the evening as still feeling “timeless”.

As the people who created it, there probably isn’t a better compliment we could receive.

But design alone cannot create that longevity.

The identity has endured because the idea beneath it has endured: Charlotte herself, her point of view, her expertise, her relationship with her clients and the world she has built around her work.

The brand has been able to evolve because its foundations were never dependent on a passing moment.

Perhaps slow is the new premium