Most of us don’t think twice about the shampoo sitting in our shower. But what if one of beauty’s most familiar products was overdue for a rethink?
Long before waterless beauty became a mainstream conversation, Everist founders Jayme Jenkins and Jessica Stevenson were questioning everything from dilution and packaging to performance and sustainability. The result was a new approach to haircare built around concentrated formulas designed to be better for both people and the planet.
In this edition of The Art of Intentions, we sat down with the founders to discuss the future of haircare, the rise of scalp health, and why they believe beauty products can be both smarter and more effective.
What conversations around sustainability or formulation do you think the beauty industry still isn’t having enough of?
We still don’t talk enough about the ‘less is more’ approach. A lot of sustainability conversations focus on swapping materials, but not enough on making products smaller, smarter, and less wasteful in the first place.
You’ve both worked inside established beauty companies and now built one from the ground up yourselves. What’s something about entrepreneurship that looks completely different once you’re actually living it?
How much of it is about resilience and evolution. From the outside, startups can look glamorous, but in reality you’re constantly solving problems and making tough decisions. You learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Tell us a little about your backgrounds before coming together to build Everist. What were those earlier career chapters like for each of you?
We both spent over a decade working in beauty and wellness, helping build brands across strategy, marketing, and product innovation. Those experiences gave us a deep understanding of how the industry works, but also exposed a lot of opportunity to rethink the traditional way of doing things. Eventually, we realized we wanted to build something ourselves that challenged the system to think differently about how beauty products are made.
You both spent years working in beauty before launching your own company. What were some of the biggest lessons or insights you took from that experience?
We learned the magic and transformational power of beauty. The sensoriality of it. The scent, the textures, the experiences that people love and want to repeat. Then we challenged ourselves to give that to customers in a way that was better for them and the planet.
Before Everist officially existed, what was the original problem you were trying to solve?
The original problem was the plastic waste crisis. Then it was the carbon impact of shipping heavy, water-filled formulas. But what really made the company come alive was discovering the impact that our hybrid skincare-based formulas were having on people’s hair, skin and scalp. The ‘people problem’, layered onto the ‘world problem’ is what allowed us to really break through.
A lot of brands talk about sustainability through packaging, but with Everist, it feels like it started much earlier at the formulation level too. Can you talk about how that thinking shaped the brand from the beginning, from removing water from the formulas to the packaging, shipping, and overall experience of using the products?
For us, sustainability starts at formulation. Water is often used as the base of traditional products, so removing it fundamentally changes everything downstream — the size of the package, the amount of plastic required, the shipping footprint, and even the manufacturing process itself.
Once we committed to creating concentrates, every other decision became interconnected. We developed formulas that are activated by the water already in your shower, which allowed us to create highly concentrated products in smaller formats. That meant lighter shipments, lower emissions, and significantly less packaging waste.
But we also knew that sustainability alone wouldn’t change behavior. The experience still had to feel elevated, luxurious, and intuitive. We spent years perfecting textures, sensorial experience, and performance because ultimately people adopt products that fit seamlessly into their routines and feel great to use. Our belief has always been that sustainable products shouldn’t feel like a compromise, they should feel like an upgrade.
Everist launched with waterless concentrates before “waterless beauty” really became a larger industry conversation. What made you both feel so strongly that this was the direction beauty needed to move in?
We are still early, but to us concentrates feel inevitable. Europe is already way ahead in terms of adoption. Not just from a sustainability standpoint, but also from a product performance standpoint. Customers are so savvy now. They want to know what’s in their products, percentages. They want to know what they’re paying for and to see the real impact on their hair, skin and scalp.
Your patent-pending Evercare Delivery System is such a core part of the brand. Can you explain what makes the technology different from traditional formulations?
Most shampoo, conditioner and body wash is based in water. Everist concentrates are based in glycerin and aloe vera (nature’s most powerful humectants). These moisturisers are what make them ‘wet’ and make up more than 50% of the formulas. The result of this for the customer is concentrates that give a beautiful lather, but don’t strip - the humectants buffer the cleansers and help pull more moisture into the skin and scalp. Whereas traditional ‘moisturising’ shampoo is often just a silicone coating on the hair, our concentrates take more of a wellness approach to haircare resulting in longer-lasting scalp hydration and softer, silkier hair after one wash.
You’ve talked about wanting to build “the company of the future.” When you think about the future of beauty and consumer brands overall, what do you hope becomes the new standard?
We hope the future standard is a more thoughtful, curated approach — fewer but better products, smarter systems, and brands that take responsibility for their full impact, not just the visible parts of it. We also hope consumers begin expecting sustainability and performance to coexist. For too long, there’s been this assumption that eco-conscious products require sacrifice, whether in efficacy, design, or experience. We think the next generation of brands will prove the opposite.
