An old drugstore name with a new owner.

HASK is a haircare brand sold in drugstores and mass retail, and it puts its age front and centre. The brand says its formulas and treatments have been made since 1946, and on its own site it marked 80 years in 2026. MediaPost’s Marketing Daily repeated the date in June 2024, describing HASK as a brand that “has been around since 1946.” The name is written in capitals because it is an acronym: the company says HASK stands for “Hair And Skin Kindness,” and Cosmetics Business gave the same expansion in November 2023.

The brand’s modern history begins with a change of owner. HASK says that in 2010 it was acquired by Inspired Beauty Brands, which it describes as experts in the hair care industry and early adopters of clean beauty principles. Cosmetics Business reported in November 2023 that Inspired Beauty Brands is based in New York, that it develops and markets personal care brands, and that its chief executive is Sam Maniaci. Inspired Beauty Brands lists HASK alongside three other names it owns: Gray Away, a root-touch-up range; HnP, which Cosmetics Business said stands for “Henna ’n’ Placenta”; and Fix Your Lid.

Under the new owner, HASK set out a list of rules for its formulas and published them as a timeline. The company says that in 2013 it adopted what it calls clean beauty standards, dropping parabens, sulfates, phthalates, gluten and artificial colours, and added “Not Tested on Animals” to every label. It says it widened its “free of” list in 2018 and received Leaping Bunny cruelty-free certification in 2019, the year it also introduced its own Clean Beauty seal, which the company itself notes is an internal standard and not independently verified. In 2020 HASK launched a Curl Care collection, which it calls its first fully vegan line.

An amber bottle, a plus sign and a mantra that became a logo.

The most constant part of HASK’s look is the bottle. When MediaPost covered the brand in June 2024, it noted that the bottles remained amber-coloured after a packaging update, and that every bottle was by then made from post-consumer recycled plastic. The ranges themselves are named by a benefit and an ingredient joined with a plus sign: Repair + Argan Oil, Soothe + Tea Tree Oil & Rosemary and Smooth + Keratin & Jojoba Oil are three of the ranges on the brand’s site. Cosmetics Business described HASK in 2023 as a label built on oils such as argan, coconut and chia seed, and MediaPost called Argan Oil the brand’s hero collection.

The name itself became part of the mark. HASK says that in 2021 “Hair And Skin Kindness” was made its official brand mantra and added to its logo, so the full expansion now travels with the four capital letters. In the same year, the company says, it joined How2Recycle and added the programme’s recycling symbols to all of its packaging.

A wider refresh followed. HASK says it launched a comprehensive global brand refresh in 2024, with a new logo emphasising the mantra and new visual branding and packaging across the portfolio. Jaime Kontz, the brand’s vice president of marketing, told MediaPost in June 2024 that the update brought a cleaner, simplified design, a new logo, a new tagline and a new colour palette, together with new call-outs on pack highlighting the clean beauty standards. The company says its paperboard displays are printed using wind power.

The brand has kept adjusting since. In 2026 HASK announced what it calls a “New Era of Kindness,” describing a brighter design with vibrant, full-colour bottles intended to make each collection easy to spot on the shelf and in the shower, alongside larger sizes and recycled plastics.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all haircare names: Shu Uemura, Leonor Greyl, René Furterer, Klorane, HASK, R+Co and John Masters Organics. Haircare brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s signature to labels that now belong to much larger beauty groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a pharmacy shelf to a salon backbar.

A haircare brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a name and the story it tells about where it came from, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two campaigns built on the same word.

HASK’s advertising has leaned on the kindness in its name. Campaign Canada reported in March 2022 that the brand had launched “Be Kind to Your Hair,” a multi-market campaign running in the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. The agency Good&Ready handled strategy and creative after what it called an informal review, Rodeo Productions produced the work and All Media Boutique handled media. The campaign ran as online video in 30-, 15- and eight-second cuts, with out-of-home, social and print, including a double-page spread in Allure. Samantha Georgakopoulos, senior marketing manager at Inspired Beauty Brands, was quoted in the piece.

Two years later the target shifted. MediaPost reported in June 2024 that HASK was launching “Repair With Care,” which the publication described as the brand’s first social-first campaign, its first aimed at millennials and its first to focus on repair treatments rather than shampoos and conditioners. The plan used GIFs, short videos and creator content across Meta, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, with brand ambassadors sharing routines built around the Argan Oil collection. The same report listed Amazon, Target, Walmart, CVS and Walgreens among the brand’s retailers, along with its own redesigned website.

The company also reports on its packaging. HASK says it began using post-consumer recycled plastic in 2023 and that by 2024 its bottles were made entirely from it, and it says it has supported reforestation through the Print Releaf programme.

The name needs care online. The domain hask.com is not the brand’s site; on a check in October 2026 it redirected to a domain-sale page, and the brand trades from haskbeauty.com.

For a design guide, HASK shows how a mass-market brand can turn an acronym into a slogan, put the slogan into the logo and let an amber bottle and a plus-sign naming system carry the range. Compare Moroccanoil, the argan-oil treatment brand, and Briogeo, the clean haircare brand. For this guide we use amber, argan gold and cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep HASK’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.