Ayurveda: The A-Beauty is Here

The champi wasn’t cool. The age-old Indian tradition of massaging your scalp with warm oils, said to be rooted in Ayurveda, may be good for your hair, but what it wasn’t was a treat. The hair hung heavy on your head, and the odour from the oils always overwhelmed. You usually reserved this ritual for Sunday mornings, when it wasn’t just time that you had on your hands, but also the comfort of seclusion, where away from the eyes of others, you could undergo this ritual that your grandmother insisted was beneficial.

Growing up, the Sunday champi was non-negotiable in Diipa Büller-Khosla’s house too. The social media influencer and entrepreneur’s mother is a dermatologist and ayurvedic practitioner, and, when she was a child, her house abounded with the smells of kitchen remedies, ayurvedic beauty hacks, and Sunday morning champis. “My mom would sit my siblings and me down and massage oil into our scalps, and at the time I probably complained about it like most kids do,” Büller-Khosla recalls.

But when she got older and moved abroad, this Sunday morning ritual from her childhood was something she began to miss. Later, when she was building indē wild, the Indian beauty brand she founded along with her husband in 2021, it was this memory, she says, of sitting down with her siblings as her mother poured generous quantities of warm oil into their scalps, that kept coming back to her.

This would result in Champi Hair Oil, indē wild’s big viral hit that the brand calls internet’s go-to-hair oil and which it has now also introduced in a slick stick form to be used for slicked-back hair styles. Büller-Khosla’s beauty brand might have had a hand in making the champi, to borrow a Gen Z slang, less cheugy (or unfashionable), but it was also tapping into something that was already building. Social media today is rife with viral oily head massages, from DIY content on how to get a self-champi to Gen Z Bollywood celebrities like Janhvi Kapoor and Ananya Pandey frequently sharing their champi routines. Even Ed Sheeran, when he travelled to India last year, couldn’t resist from getting one for himself. “Suddenly, oiling became a statement. We saw so many comments saying ‘indē wild made champi cool again’, and that’s when we realised: Gen Z isn’t only rediscovering these rituals…they’re rewriting the narrative around them. They’re using platforms like TikTok and Instagram to normalise (and glamorise) what used to be behind closed doors. This generation has shown us that heritage and modernity don’t have to be opposites,” Büller-Khosla says. “Hair oiling is no longer just what your <naani> made you do, it’s a beauty power move. They’re showing up, roots oiled, camera on, and saying, ‘This is mine’. That ownership and pride? That’s what makes it cool.”

The transformation of this ancient Indian practice from an ordeal that one endured behind closed doors into the latest beauty hack might be most visible with the champi. But it is actually one that is taking place well beyond and across ayurvedic products and practices. Gen Zs are taking to ‘haldi face masks’ and moringa and hibiscus hair cleansers; there is talk of A-Beauty (Ayurvedic Beauty) becoming the next big thing after K-Beauty (Korean Beauty) in global skincare; supermarket shelves stacked up with shiny new products from toothpastes to facial creams now scream out their herbal and ayurvedic ingredients; new ayurveda brands are emerging that claim to blend modern science with traditional ingredients; even as new technologies are trying to bridge the gap between modern evidence-based healthcare and traditional ayurveda. All this is happening as the entire market of ayurveda is witnessing a massive growth, with some brands even taking their products to foreign markets now.

“If you look at modern medicine and if you look at Ayurveda, one of the biggest differentiators is that modern medicine will talk about treatment, but Ayurveda will always talk about cure,” says Robin Jha, the co-founder of NirogStreet, a platform that connects ayurvedic doctors with patients, when talking about the reasons behind the growth in patients seeking ayurvedic treatments. “Now that cure will not always be 100 percent, since it depends upon upon your body or how long a disease has been present. So one of the things that I think has happened is that this idea of cure is something that has echoed really well with patients.”

NirogStreet was launched in 2016 as a content and community platform for ayurveda doctors, where they could connect and discuss cases and the ayurveda knowledge system with one another. But in 2020, as the Covid pandemic raged through the world and presented new business opportunities, the founders changed the platform’s orientation. NirogStreet already had a number of ayurveda doctors on the platform, and they now enabled patients to seek video consultations with these doctors, while doubling down on getting more doctors on the platform. The firm also introduced a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool called Vaidya Tool that allowed doctors to write prescriptions and manage the records digitally. At the back-end, the firm also began handling the stocking of ayurveda drugs, and enabled the doctors to buy these drugs from the platform directly, with the firm taking care of the entire delivery process. “In ayurveda, generally, the number of SKUs [stock keeping units] is significantly high because there are multiple brands. What happens now is that a doctor does not have to worry about the inventory of the medicine. So we have solved that problem for the doctors,” he says.

What all these steps also enabled, Jha says, is to address the issue of mistrust that often plagues the ecosystem around ayurveda, with patients not having to worry about the credibility of doctors and the quality of the medicines they purchase. “What we have essentially doing is that we have created a platform where there are high quality doctors and high quality medicine brands. It is both easier for medicine manufacturers to reach doctors, and for doctors spread out across Tier 2 and 3 cities to get access to these medicines. And for patients, they can now reach the right doctors. So we are building trust throughout the entire ecosystem.”

The ayurveda products’ market is today believed to be upwards of $7 billion. According to a report put out by NirogStreet, the market generated this much revenue for ayurveda products by the end of the financial year 2023-24, and that by 2027-28, it would reach $16.27 billion. There are several reasons for this growth. There is the global shift that is taking place toward holistic health and preventive care, and a rising preference for natural, chemical-free alternatives to synthetic pharmaceuticals, which new-age ayurveda brands have been quick to pivot their business towards. The pandemic played a particularly important role, according to those in this space, with more individuals turning their focus to ayurvedic products that are believed to boost one’s immunity. The government’s push towards traditional medicinal practices through its AYUSH ministry is also believed to have played a role. To Büller-Khosla, the key factor behind this growth has been over how the young Indian is reclaiming their identity. “For a long time, globalisation made a lot of us look outward, often westward, for aspiration because that’s where a lot of the information was coming from... Western brands felt more advanced, more luxurious, more desirable, whereas Ayurveda and what was at home felt functional, maybe even old-fashioned,” she says. “But that same globalization has given Gen Z and young millennials a very different relationship with culture. There’s pride now and curiosity as well as a desire to reclaim what’s ours, but in our own language.”

While the boom in ayurveda has been widespread across categories, one that has witnessed a particularly large growth has been the one around beauty and personal care. Some of these firms, having found success domestically, are now taking their products overseas. These range from the likes of indē wild, which having introduced its products to the UK market via a partnership with Sephora last year, has now launched its products in the US market with a similar tie up with the beauty chain, to the likes of older, well established brands like Kama Ayurveda, which was a trendsetter when it launched itself in the UK a few years ago. “What we find internationally mirrors what we see in India, but with an added dimension. Consumers around the world are turning toward traditional wellness systems, not out of nostalgia, but out of a growing dissatisfaction with surface-level solutions. Ayurveda offers something different: a complete philosophy. A way of understanding the body not as something to be fixed, but as something to be understood and kept in balance,” says Vivek Sahni, the co-founder of Kama Ayurveda.

To international customers, Sahni says, what resonates most is less about any single product, but more about the experience of being introduced to that philosophy. “For many, it is the first time they have encountered the idea that skincare is not universal, that there is an ancient and intelligent framework for individual difference. When that idea lands, it does not just sell a product. It opens a door,” he says.

When Kama Ayurveda was launched more than two decades ago, the ayurveda beauty space was still in its infancy. Sahni says he got his first glimpse of the potential in this sector when when he was roped in to work with local Khadi cooperatives to create a range of products and gift boxes for the Khadi and Village Industries Commission. The question that rankled him the most then, he says, was why a sophisticated wellness system like Ayurvedic knowledge had not been represented globally in a way that did it justice. “No brand was taking these formulations seriously enough to present them with the rigour and intentionality they deserved,” he says.

The brand has grown rapidly since then. It has 67 standalone stores across India today, alongside a presence in multiple partner retail locations, apart from a direct-to-consumer website, and also an international presence. “What is driving its [ayurveda’s growth] is a fundamental shift in how people think about care itself. Consumers today are less interested in quick fixes and more drawn to products that restore balance over time. There is a growing desire to understand what goes into a formulation, why it works, and what philosophy sits behind it,” he says.

The growth isn’t limited to just the beauty space. There is an equally large growth in the health supplements and nutraceutical space. And some of the firms in this sector, well established brands that have always dabbled in ayurveda, are now shedding their old syrup-heavy, medicinal image to speak in the language of Gen Z. Think chyawanprash capsules and sugar-free options. Mohit Malhotra, the CEO of Dabur India, points out that while chyawanprash has remained a household staple in India for decades, the firm felt that younger consumers may not always relate to the traditional spoon-and-bottle format. “That led us to introduce chyawanprash tablets and gummies, offering the same core benefits in formats that are easier to consume and more in tune with modern lifestyles. Similarly, we’ve introduced sugar-free variants across categories, responding to growing awareness around sugar intake and metabolic health,” he says, while also pointing out other re-imagined ayurvedic remedies that it has introduced, from Honitus Hot Sip Kadha and Shilajit resins to its new range of Siens products that comes in modern formats like gummies, softgels and powders.

The growth in the ayurveda market is also leading to the emergence of new technology startups in this space, from the likes of NirogStreet that connects doctors, patients and medicine manufacturers, to firms that are creating new devices that can improve and standardise ayurveda care. One such startup is NadiPulse Prognostics, whose Kanpur-based founder Kajal Srivastava has developed nPulse, a wrist-based diagnostic tool that helps read the ‘nadi’ or pulse of patients according to ayurvedic parameters, and provides insights into the patient’s physical and mental health via an app. Srivastava began working on the device during the final year of her engineering degree in 2017, when she learned from her father, an ayurvedic doctor, how the practice of reading the pulse in ayurveda, considered an important aspect of this system, was fast disappearing. “It is not so much in practice now because it has sort of lost the battle to modern diagnostic tools…Only a handful of doctors rely on reading the nadi now,” she says.

Srivastava’s nPulse is meant to be used both by ayurvedic doctors and lay individuals, and the report the app generates comes in a form that is easy to understand. Although its been available for sale only for around six months, Srivastava and her team have been using it for much longer and she claims it has thrown interesting insights, like making individuals aware of lingering issues like the build up of uric acid, cholesterol and even fatty liver that hadn’t previously been picked up by blood tests and modern scanning devices.

Aniruddha Joshi, the founder of Pune-based Atreya Innovations, has been working on a similar device that reads the pulse according to ayurvedic parameters. This device, called Nadi Tarangini which is patented and has received approval from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation uses sensors and AI to detect, analyse and predict imbalances. The idea of such a device struck Joshi when he once accompanied his father, the well-known chemical-nuclear scientist JB Joshi to an ayurvedic doctor. His father had been unwell, but while allopathic medicine hadn’t been of much help, it was ayurveda that had brought some relief. During that consultation, Joshi was intrigued by the wealth of information the practitioner was able to extract merely by placing his fingers on the patient’s wrist.

Over time, Joshi relaised that reading the nadi was more like and art, and that the big challenge in this space was that of standardisation. “We wanted to introduce evidence-based tools to standardise this practice,” Joshi says.

The Nadi Tarangini is meant for ayurvedic doctors, since the report generated requires someone adept in ayurveda to interpret it. Joshi is currently raising funds from investors to launch a similar device that can be used by lay individuals and whose report is much easier to interpret. If it all goes to plan, Joshi hopes to have the product out before year end.

Back at Kama Ayurveda, when asked whether ayurveda suffered from the image of something that was ancient and boring, Sahni says the problem was that it was misunderstood and associated with home remedies. “That image, however affectionate, buried what Ayurveda actually is. Ayurveda is a science. A precise, documented, deeply rigorous one. The formulations are not approximations or handed-down guesses. They are the result of thousands of years of careful observation, preparation, and refinement,” he says. “Understanding that changes everything.”