Brooke Shields's Must Haves: From a Dry Shampoo to a Morning Tea

Get the Full StoryIt's a rainy Monday in New York and I'm having a beer with Brooke Shields. The model, actress, philanthropist, author, and now beauty aficionado has a lot to say about her latest venture, her hair-care brand Commence, which launched in the summer of 2024. She never imagined herself getting into this business - her community simply demanded it. During COVID, Shields launched an online forum where she could connect with other women and hear what they were going through called Beginning Is Now. Today, the Beginning Is Now website links directly to the Commence hair-care site, marrying the two ventures together. And tucked into the cozy back room of the woman-owned New York City brewery, Talea, I got to hear all about it.

"Out of that community, the need, the desire, the request for certain products that solved certain issues that women over 40 were starting to experience came forth ," Shields says. "So much of it actually was geared towards hair, hair loss, thinning, dullness, fizziness, just scalp health, itchy patches, oily patches, things that we never, in our youth, experienced."

The brand launched with a hero product, the two-in-one instant dry shampoo, which is lightweight, benzene- and aerosol-free, and can even be used on thin, fine hair, and has since expanded to six mainstay products. So what makes a hair-care product specific to women over 40? According to Shields and Commence's head of research and development, Mark Knitowski, it's about both the types of ingredients you choose and how you formulate and use each of those ingredients.

For example, the Commence team discovered that in women over 40, the pores on their scalps have begun to shrink. Therefore, many of the products on the market that tout hyaluronic acid as a hydrating ingredient were just slipping off their heads as soon as it was applied. "Mark was able to quaternate the hyaluronic acid and put it in a dry formula," says Shields of her dry-shampoo formula, so it actually penetrates the hair and contributes to overall scalp health. "We need to approach beauty and hair care for women over 40 differently," she says. "That's all. It's that simple."

The entire concept behind gearing products toward women over 40 is Shields' passionate belief that "the best is yet to come." But in order to do it all quite literally, in Shields's case , you need a few daily must-haves to keep life firing on all cylinders. Here are some of the staples that Shields can't live without, from her favorite Commence product to the item she uses to unwind at the end of a long day.

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