Whether you know Gisou as an influencer-inspired hair oil or recognize that distinguishable bottle that often appears in the chicest of shelfies, it’s a brand that most beauty aficionados already know by name.
Before, you could only purchase the line online or at select retailers, but with the launch of the brand’s honey-infused hair care at North American Sephora stores and Sephora.com on August 18, the Gisou fan base will continue to grow. To get enough product to the stores, cofounder Negin Mirsalehi says they had to double down on their sustainably-sourced honey in order to meet the greater demand.
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Gisou, which stands for “golden hair lock” in Persian, was built on the Mirsalehi family tradition of beekeeping. As sixth-generation beekeepers, the bees came first, and the hair-care company followed once Mirsalehi emerged as a popular fashion influencer whose followers only wanted to know about her hair. In 2015, she and her family began the beauty startup with a focus on natural beauty and sustainability, using honey made at the family’s bee farm in Holland to distribute the family’s homemade hair oil, the brand’s hero product.
As Gishou launches both on Sephora.com and in 71 Sephora stores in the U.S. and Canada beginning next week, we can thank the Mirsalehi bees, which have been working hard for more than a year to prepare. “Honeybees follow a seasonal pattern, which we base our beekeeping calendar on to harvest honey twice a year— late spring and late summer,” says Mirsalehi.
“The beekeeping calendar involves a lot of planning and coordination with our product development calendar in order to ensure we continue to only ever take the surpluses of honey. For Sephora, we forecasted we would need twice as much honey as we normally would.”
As more Sephora customers grow to love the honey and propolis infused hair heroes—the Honey Infused Hair Oil ($87) and Hair Mask ($62) are instant classics—Mirsalehi says the brand is committed to sticking to their sustainably-sourced model without compromising their vision or family heritage: “We’ll continue to source our honey strictly from our own bee garden, because it is important to us that we control our bee-centered approach as well as the consistency and quality of our honey.”
