From mixing body lotion with setting lotion on shoots to a salon range.

KEVIN.MURPHY is a professional haircare brand named after its founder, the Australian hairdresser Kevin Murphy. The company says he trained at Vidal Sassoon in London before returning to Australia, and built a career as a session stylist in editorial, runway and film work; it lists the film Moulin Rouge! among his credits. BeautyMatter, reporting in April 2023, described him as an editorial stylist and the brand as “a fashion-focused range of salon-only, professional haircare and color products.”

The company’s account of how the brand began is a practical one. Murphy says his “skincare for your hair” idea started on photo shoots in the early 1990s, when the products he needed did not exist; the company says that mixing products such as body lotion with setting lotion “is how the brand was born.” Its website still carries the line “SKIN CARE FOR YOUR HAIR” in its page titles.

The brand’s own 20th-anniversary timeline dates the launch to 2004: “In partnership with Peter McDonald, KEVIN.MURPHY the brand is born with seven products,” among them ANTI.GRAVITY, HAIR.RESORT and ROUGH.RIDER. A May 2023 report in Salon Today, first published by Modern Salon, describes McDonald as the chairman and co-founder who met Murphy in 2004 and helped develop the brand and establish the Kevin Murphy Group. The company says those first formulas used naturally derived ingredients and were free of sulphates and parabens. The company marked twenty years in 2024 with limited-edition bottles of HAIR.RESORT.SPRAY and ANTI.GRAVITY.SPRAY carrying Murphy’s signature.

Names with full stops, and beach hair.

The most recognisable habit of the brand is typographic. The name is written in capitals with a full stop between the two words — KEVIN.MURPHY — and the products follow the same pattern: HAIR.RESORT, ANTI.GRAVITY, YOUNG.AGAIN, EVERLASTING.COLOUR. Even the brand’s shows and programmes take the form, from SESSION.SALON, its education programme, to FUTURE.LOVE and FAST.FORWARD, the names of its stylist events.

The company’s timeline ties several products to stories from Murphy’s editorial work. It says the first KEVIN.MURPHY advertising campaign, in 2007, showed “beach hair”; that a 2008 shoot for Vogue in India, where he used pigment powders on a model, led to COLOUR.BUG; and that a wave crashing onto a beach set in Malaysia gave him the idea of mixing eyeshadow with hair gel, which inspired HAIR.RESORT.

The range grew outward from styling. The company dates its first shampoo-and-conditioner pair, HYDRATE-ME.WASH and RINSE, to 2010, the treatment oil YOUNG.AGAIN to 2014, and its first colour line to 2018, when KEVIN MURPHY LOVES COLOR.ME was renamed COLOR.ME BY KEVIN.MURPHY and launched globally. In 2014 it also set up The Heart of KEVIN.MURPHY and worked with Culture Is Life, an Aboriginal-led not-for-profit organisation, the company says. The company says its products and ingredients are not tested on animals.

Fashion has stayed close to the brand. Its website describes three pillars — Fashion, Performance and Environment — and the motto “Hair should perform as well as it looks.” The company says 2019 marked Murphy’s fifteenth year as hair director for Melbourne Fashion Week, and that its stylist shows have travelled widely: FUTURE.LOVE was staged in Prague and Las Vegas in 2018, and FAST.FORWARD in Austin, Texas, and Berlin in 2022. The colour and care lines later met: the company dates EVERLASTING.COLOUR, its first treatment with bond-building technology, to 2021, and COLOR.ME GLOSS to 2023.

Haircare and design.

The seven brands in this group are all hair-care names: KEVIN.MURPHY, Sachajuan, Maria Nila, IGK, Virtue, Fekkai and Pureology. Hair-care brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger beauty groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a hairdresser’s back bar to a department store or an online shop.

A hair-care brand’s identity is usually carried less by any one formula than by a bottle, a name and a colour code on the shelf, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its offices or grown far beyond the salon or city where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how its packaging and name have changed over time.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its packaging and how its look has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word. None of these guides assesses what a product does for hair; claims about ingredients or results are the companies’ own.

A group, an apology and a sand-and-sea palette.

The brand has grown into a group. In April 2023 Cosmetics Business reported that the Kevin Murphy Group had acquired Showpony, an Australian hair-extensions company, and BeautyMatter called KEVIN.MURPHY an “Australian professional haircare group.” The Salon Today report of May 2023 said Peter McDonald would become global chief executive from 1 July 2023, with Laurent Misischi, chief executive since 2020, moving to a new role overseeing the group’s other brands and affiliates. The report listed the businesses added under Misischi as Showpony, Beautyscope, Belludio and Kevin.Murphy Versailles; Showpony’s founder, Stephanie Mason, told Cosmetics Business that joining the group would give the company “our wings as a global company.”

Packaging is where the brand made its boldest public promise. At its FUTURE.LOVE event in Las Vegas on 16 September 2018, Salon Today reported, Murphy announced that its bottles would be made from 100% recycled ocean plastic, with the first appearing in salons in mid-2019. In December 2020 the company published a letter from Misischi saying it could not currently supply 100% Ocean Waste Plastic packaging, that its packaging supplier could not guarantee that bottles labelled “100% OWP” were accurate, and that the label would be removed from all new production. The letter apologised and said the company had started independent investigations and would strengthen its audits. Today the company describes moving to recycled materials and reducing virgin plastic across its range.

For a design guide, KEVIN.MURPHY shows how a punctuation mark can carry a brand: one full stop, repeated across every product name, makes the range instantly recognisable. Compare Oribe, another salon haircare brand, and Davines. For this guide we use deep ocean, sand and black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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