‘If our hair doesn’t look good we don’t feel good’: Anabel Kingsley on her hair treatment specialists

Anabel Kingsley, as befits a trichologist, has a wonderful, radiant head of hair, strawberry blond with highlights. But she doesn’t always. She contracted a condition (ulcerative colitis) in her twenties that, from time to time, causes her hair to fall out. “When I tell my clients I know how you feel,” she says, “I really do know how they feel.” Which partly explains how she came to follow in her father’s footsteps to head up Philip Kingsley, the hair treatment specialists, with clinics in London and New York and celebrity customers, including Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow.

I have to apologise for my own dysfunctional haircut when we meet, having attempted a bit of DIY barbering with a handy pair of kitchen scissors. “Most people have a good sense of humour about their hair,” says Kingsley. “Until something goes wrong with it. Then they don’t.”

Anabel Kingsley grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with an American singer-psychoanalyst mother and an English trichologist father. Philip Kingsley – she calls him “the hair guru” – had gone to New York in the Eighties to open a clinic there. “I was born bald and then I started using Philip Kingsley products,” says Kingsley, laughing.

They took the QE2 back to London when she was seven. “We got free tickets in exchange for my father giving lectures on hair in mid-Atlantic. At the time, I didn’t take a lot of notice of what he was doing.” The young Kingsley enjoyed history at school and ended up studying history and medicine at the University of Kent in Canterbury. She wrote her thesis about plagues and, presciently enough, what would happen if we got hit by a pandemic. Her favourite period was the Black Death. “It was a very gory plague,” she says. “And what’s interesting is how wrong everyone was about the causes. They blamed it on ‘humours’ and ‘bad air’.”

She moved back to New York to become a singer-songwriter and worked as a waitress and receptionist at Soho House. Her colitis, although genetic, was triggered by working long hours into the night. It was around this time that she realised her dream of a singing career “was probably unrealistic. You can’t just like singing. You have to be able to give your whole life up to it. I didn’t have that.”

So she asked her dad if she could do something at the clinic while trying to work out what she really wanted to do with her life. She ended up in the backroom packaging up mail orders, but fell in love with the business. “It’s great to be able to have a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s medical and it’s psychological and it’s wellness all in one.” Kingsley says that working at the clinic was “timely” given what she was going through. “It gave me an understanding of how general health and wellbeing can impact on hair.”

Philip Kingsley sold the business to Elizabeth Arden, but bought it back again because he didn’t approve of the way it was being run. “His baby wasn’t being properly nurtured,” says his daughter. The whole family moved back to London to concentrate on the London clinic. Anabel took a trichology degree – the scientific study of hair and scalp – at the Institute of Trichologists while Philip Kingsley went on working, writing a book, Hair: An Owner’s Handbook, and still formulating new products, until the day he dropped dead of a stroke, aged 86. “It was a complete shock to everyone,” says Anabel. “He didn’t leave me any instructions because he thought he’d live forever.”

When her father died, her hair fell out. Emotional trauma and physical depletion will often have a deleterious effect on hair. “Typically,” says Kingsley, “victims of the pandemic are going to lose their hair.” The reason for this is simple: “Hair is useless. It doesn’t serve any purpose, it’s just a remnant.” I suspect this line may not appear in the standard trichologist text books. “It’s not an essential tissue – it doesn’t help you to breathe. The body will shed it to concentrate on other things. If you have a fever, for example.”

At the same time, we are very attached to our hair, most of all when it is detaching itself. Says Kingsley, “It influences how we feel about ourselves. If our hair doesn’t look good we don’t feel good. And if it looks good, we are more attractive to others.”

The great French poet Charles Baudelaire said that hair is “an aromatic forest, the oasis of dreams, the gourd from which I inhale the wine of memory”. What he forgot to point out is that hair is made of protein. It’s mostly keratin. If you want good hair, you need a good diet. “Without adequate protein, hair can become brittle and fragile,” says Kingsley. “Vegans can eat nuts and tofu and chickpeas.”

Philip Kingsley concocted his “Elasticizer” specifically for Audrey Hepburn. Now Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet swear by it. But looking after your hair is not all about using the right products. “The word ‘holistic’ is thrown around a lot,” says Kingsley, “but hair really requires a holistic approach. It’s diet, it’s lifestyle, it’s family history, it’s stress levels. It’s all connected. Everything is relevant. You have to look at someone in the round.”

If your hair is matted and tangled, it may be a sign of psychological distress. “It’s a reflection of our inner selves,” says Kingsley. “I have a friend whose hair lets me know if she’s in a bad mood. She pulls it back and ties it in a certain way.”

Hair can be a sign of rebellion. “If your marriage falls apart, you may drastically change your hair – it’s an escape from who you were, a way of remaking yourself.” And of course, hair is romance. “If you’re flirting with someone, you run your hand through your hair or shake your head around to give it prominence.”

Kingsley thinks of herself as a being “a bit like Sherlock Holmes. Hair is so often a mystery. If someone’s hair is breaking, you can’t just recommend a potion. Why is it breaking in the first place? You have to figure out what’s playing into it.”

She says that so-called “male pattern baldness” is equally common in women, just not as severe. It can be treated topically with “anti-androgens” that block the effects of testosterone on follicles (by stopping testosterone shifting up a gear into the serial hair-killer that is dihydrotestosterone or DHT). But a large part of the job is talking to people. “Every time I give a consultation and they leave feeling more confident – that’s made it all worthwhile for me.”

Your hair can impact not only on your own life but on the lives of those around you. Kingsley has treated women who won’t take their kids to school in the morning because they’re worried the other mothers will be judging them – whispering about how bad their hair looks behind their backs.

One woman who consulted the clinic was suffering from a flaky scalp. She liked wearing black. But the problem was that her dandruff was too visible and she had to wear more forgiving colours. Anabel Kingsley fixed the problem. “At last!” the client exclaimed, “I can finally wear my favourite dress.”