A client’s hair stretched and snapped at the shampoo bowl — there was no integrity left. The only option was to cut it all off.
Working as a stylist in Wyoming, Camie had evaluated the hair and warned it couldn’t take another perm. The client went ahead anyway, permed it at home, and came back asking Camie to fix it.
There was nothing to fix. The damage was irreversible.
The Cell Membrane Complex — an adhesive that holds hair together — wasn’t even identified until 2009. No one had connected it to the damage stylists see every day.
Camie went back to school for a bachelor’s, then a master’s in chemistry. She found the CMC research and immediately recognized what it meant: chemical services destroy the membrane, then surfactants wash away what’s left.
‘We have this beautiful, intricate protection,’ Camie says, ‘and then we destroy it.’
Biomimetic sunflower oil — structurally matched to restore the lipid layer that chemical services strip away — became the breakthrough.
Her department chair saw the research and told her she could turn it into a company. After years of development, the formula became IUVENI’s patented Lipid Layer Quencher.
‘This is disruptive technology,’ Camie says. ‘Because there is nothing like this.’
