Hair Oiling Went Viral in the West. Now It's Being Sold Back to Us.
I was on Nykaa this morning and a hair oil stopped me mid-scroll: ₹4,950 for 100ml. Fable & Mane's HoliRoots — Editor's Pick badge, 1,388 ratings, sitting in the Luxe section like it was born there (checked 9 July). I opened the ingredient list expecting something I'd never heard of. Instead, I found - Castor, sesame, amla, bhringraj, brahmi. My grandmother could dictate that list with her eyes closed. She'd also charge you nothing, though she would pull your hair while doing it.
The route to that price runs, of course, through TikTok. Around 2022 the Sunday champi, the one half of us spent our childhoods squirming through, resurfaced there as "hair slugging," a tag now past 25 million posts (TikTok's discover page). The South Asian reaction, as Refinery29 reported at the time, was mostly exhaustion: kids once teased for oiled plaits at school watched the ritual get renamed and celebrated the moment it appeared on other people's heads.
Fable & Mane got there before the discourse even finished. Founded in 2020 by Akash and Nikita Mehta, British-Indian siblings, it took the ritual to Sephora dressed for the occasion: ayurvedic extracts in a light ester base, a jasmine-and-champaca scent the website promises will transport you to Madurai, an Allure Best of Beauty seal on the cap, and since April 2025, Kareena Kapoor Khan as its first global ambassador. $38 for 55ml in the US.
I did the maths on my phone calculator, twice, because I didn't believe it the first time. Parachute Advansed sells 250ml for about ₹148 (Pricee, May 2026), which works out to 60 paise per ml. HoliRoots on Nykaa works out to ₹49.50 per ml. That's an 84x premium for the same ritual and a fair chunk of the same ingredient list. And the part I can't get over: the 100ml bottle costs $38, about ₹3700, on the brand's own American website. We pay more for it here than Americans do. The oil left India, acquired a fragrance and an accent, and came home more expensive than it is abroad.
And look the premium isn't buying nothing. The formula is lighter than raw coconut oil, it washes out properly, it smells like a hotel spa instead of a kitchen. Mostly, though, it buys the version of the ritual you can post and if you spent your school years abroad embarrassed about the oil in your hair, that repackaging does real emotional work. I don't want to be snide about it.
The obvious comeback here is inde wild. Diipa Büller-Khosla went and called her product Champi Hair Oil, no translation offered, a 130ml at an MRP of ₹1,999, about ₹15 per ml on Nykaa, 8,500-plus ratings, the formula credited to her mother, Sangitha Khosla. It's the honest middle between Parachute and HoliRoots. But check the passport again: Büller-Khosla is an Amsterdam-based influencer who made her name on Cannes red carpets. Both premium tiers of India's oldest hair ritual now belong to founders who built their brands looking at India from the outside.
Séra's Verdict: The story premium only works where the ritual was lost. HoliRoots isn't overpriced in fact it's correctly priced for a girl in London buying back her own childhood, and the India listing is brand tourism; we were never the customer. Nothing was sold back to us. We're watching someone else's homecoming through the window. The real gap sits between Parachute's 60 paise and inde wild's ₹15, a 25x canyon nobody has claimed, and it won't be won with a better story, because here the story is free. Everyone has the grandmother. What the Indian customer at ₹300–800 has never been offered is proof: real percentages, a real trial, per-ml math printed like the brand is proud of it. Abroad, champi needed a storyteller. Here, it needs a witness.
