Ayurveda: The A-Beauty is Here

GROWING UP, THE Sunday champi, the age-old Indian tradition of massaging your scalp with warm oils, said to be rooted in Ayurveda, was non-negotiable in Diipa Büller-Khosla’s house. 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 indeēwild, the Indian beauty brand she founded along with her husband in 2021, it was this memory, she says, that kept coming back to her.

This would result in Champi Hair Oil, inde 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 hairstyles. Büller-Khosla’s beauty brand might have had a hand in making the champi fashionable, 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 Panday frequently sharing their champi routines. Even Ed Sheeran, when he travelled to India last year, couldn’t resist getting one for himself. “Suddenly, oiling became a statement. 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 glamourise] 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 cofounder of NirogStreet, a platform that connects ayurvedic doctors with patients, when talking about the reasons behind the growth in patients seeking ayurvedic treatments.

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, 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 backend, 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 done 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 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 young Indians are 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 globalisation  has given Gen Z and 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 with particularly large growth has been 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 indeēwild 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 cofounder 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.

WhenKamaAyurvedawaslaunched 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 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 learnt 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 it has 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 such as 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 realised that reading the nadi was more like an 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 yearend.

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.”