Born in a German colour house’s portfolio.

KERASILK did not begin as a company. It began as a product line inside Goldwell, the professional hair-colour house that, Modern Salon and Salon Today reported in September 2023, was founded in 1948 in Darmstadt, Germany, by the husband-and-wife team Hans Erich and Edith Dotter. The brand’s own timeline puts its start at 1984, with the entry “Launch KERASILK Goldwell,” and describes it as “born in the salon, in the 1980s.”

Five years later the line changed hands along with its parent. Kao, the Japanese company whose corporate history traces its origins to Nagase Shoten, a Western sundry goods dealer started by Tomiro Nagase in 1887, records that in 1989 it acquired Goldwell AG in what was then West Germany; the company was renamed KPSS-Kao Professional Salon Services GmbH in 2003, and in 2009 Kao bought the premium hair-care factory responsible for Goldwell products. Kao has owned KERASILK since that 1989 purchase of Goldwell.

For most of its history the name sat on Goldwell packs, and the brand’s timeline is a list of relaunches rather than founders. It gives relaunches in 1994, with new sub-lines, in 2003, and in 2013, when the range added the KERASILK Keratin Treatment, a salon smoothing service; a “premium expansion” followed in 2015. The years after that brought volume, colour and reconstruct lines in 2016, hair fragrances in 2016 and 2017, a de-frizz service called KERASILK Control and a styling range in 2017, a colour upgrade in 2018, a Revitalize line in 2019 and, in 2020, a hand wash and hand lotion. KERASILK now refers to “our 40-year history of innovation.”

Silk, then a lab-made version of it.

The name joins two hair-care ingredients: keratin, the protein hair is made of, and silk. Its site says it later fused the silk with keratin, and the keratin smoothing service of 2013 carried the name into salon treatments.

The current range rests on a different kind of silk. KERASILK says that “all KERASILK formulations are infused with Biomimetic Silk,” an ingredient it presents as a bioengineered, vegan alternative to silk from silkworms, and it groups its formulas under the label “Silk+ Technology.” SheerLuxe, in a May 2025 article, described the products as “100% vegan” with biomimetic silk as the hero ingredient. The brand also says it has joined PETA’s “Beauty without Bunnies” programme, which it calls a continuation of a long-standing commitment to the fair treatment of animals.

Its current products have plain descriptive names: a Smoothing Shampoo and Conditioner, a Smoothing Mask, a Multi-Benefit Hair Oil and a Liquid Cuticle Filler, alongside scalp serums, flat-iron sprays and a Hydrating Essence. KERASILK says its fragrances were “developed in collaboration with French perfumers in Grasse,” and that it works to minimise packaging and waste and maximise recycled components.

The brand uses a hexagon as a recurring shape. For a holiday campaign it worked with the jewellery maker Maggi Simpkins, who, the brand says, designed a piece that combines bold stones with KERASILK’s “iconic hexagonal shape.” The colours and typefaces of the KERASILK identity are not documented in the sources we used; the palette on this page is our own.

Salon haircare and its owners.

The seven brands in this group are all hair-care names: Joico, UNITE, Kerasilk, ELEVEN Australia, Philip B, Hairstory and Innersense. Hair-care brands sit at many different points in the trade, from small companies still run by the hairdressers or founders who started them to lines that now belong to much larger beauty groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a salon backbar to a department store or a website.

Salon brands in particular are often built by people who came from behind the chair, and many were first sold to salons before they reached shops. Their identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a bottle and a way of talking to stylists, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production to a contract manufacturer or grown far beyond the salon where it began.

That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: 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 bottles and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a Goldwell sub-brand to a masterbrand.

By 2023 Kao was presenting KERASILK as a brand in its own right. Kao’s salon business now presents itself as a group of brands rather than one house: in September 2023 Modern Salon and Salon Today listed the Kao Salon Division, part of Japan-based Kao Corporation, as Goldwell, Oribe, KMS, Kerasilk and Varis, under global president Dominic Pratt, who took the role on 1 September 2021. In August 2023 FashionUnited reported that Kao had appointed Christian Melcher to a newly created post of global chief marketing officer for its salon business, overseeing brand development, marketing, digital and communications for Goldwell, KMS and Kerasilk.

The relaunch reached markets at different times. The Australian salon magazine The Journal marked the brand’s official relaunch there in a post dated 13 April 2023, describing it as “hair care for the modern, conscious beauty enthusiast.” In Britain, SheerLuxe reported in May 2025 that the range had “just dropped” at the retailer LOOKFANTASTIC. On its website, KERASILK presents itself as part of Kao, carrying the Kao mark rather than Goldwell’s.

The brand’s own record is a run of relaunches rather than a founder story: a name that began as a Goldwell line in 1984, was relaunched in 1994, 2003, 2013 and 2015, and now carries a biomimetic-silk ingredient story, a cruelty-free pledge and a hexagon motif — all while staying inside the group that bought Goldwell in 1989.

For a design guide, KERASILK shows how a sub-brand can be lifted into a masterbrand by giving it a single ingredient story and a recurring shape. Compare Oribe, the American salon brand that Kao bought in 2018 and that now sits beside KERASILK in the same division, and Joico, another professional haircare name. For this guide we use taupe, raw silk and champagne with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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