As the hair department head of Netflix’s most popular show Stranger Things, Sarah Hindsgaul has spent a decade immersed in 1980s excess — shaping looks like the poufy curls of Natalia Dyer’s Nancy Wheeler and the dirty pompadour of Joe Keery’s Steve Harrington for all five seasons.

With the show at an end, she’s debuting a new hair-care brand that’s a far cry from her signature maximalist perms and mullets.

“It’s just not cool to be too overstyled,” the Copenhagen-born hairstylist told The Business of Beauty. “That’s the Scandinavian in me. I was just like, ‘I don’t want to look like I did anything.’”

Launching Jan. 12, Hindsgaul Hair pairs minimalist, butter-yellow packaging with a product lineup to achieve her favored effortless, low-key look. It’s a sharp contrast with the big, era-specific hairstyles of Stranger Things, as well as a departure from the usual beauty brand launch playbook. While celebrity beauty brands are commonplace (Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown has her own in Florence by Mills), Hindsgaul is one of the first on-set professionals to step into the spotlight with a line of her own.

The new line’s sole nod to the show is a typewriter-style font inspired by film scripts. But the initial assortment — a scalp scrub, hair mask, lightweight mousse and dry shampoo — lend themselves to natural styles more Copenhagen Fashion Week than Hawkins, Indiana 1987, with Scandinavian ingredients including Nordic cotton and cloudberry.

“We have a real knowledge of what stuff looks like,” said Hindsgaul of on-set beauty professionals. “It has to last for 16 hours, but also have the movement.” Only a few of her peers have also launched brands, drawing on their high standards for products. But with Hollywood’s job market in a grim spot, more may soon follow their lead.

A New Kind of Hollywood Brand

Hollywood has long been an epicenter of the US’ beauty industry — in 1909, Max Factor, developed straight from Hollywood sets, became the first consumer-facing makeup brand in the country. In the 1960s, the head of makeup at 20th Century Fox quit his job to focus on professional-grade cosmetics, which is how the line Ben Nye was born.

More recently, celebrities themselves have taken center stage as beauty founders. But the streaming-era ubiquity of certain shows has elevated some on-set artists to household themselves. HBO’s Euphoria, an instant hit thanks to its lush visuals, vaulted its relatively unknown makeup artist Donni Davy into the spotlight and helped her launch her line Half Magic in 2022. Kim Kimble, the hair department head for Euphoria, launched a hair-care line in 2020.

These professionals are tapping new income streams as set work becomes less reliable. Job availability has been hit by a wide range of factors, including specific events like the strikes and the LA fires, as well as structural issues like studios moving filming outside California. Industry consolidation and the rise of AI have generated more worries, and major unions representing Hollywood labour expressed concerns last week over Netflix’s pending acquisition of Warner Bros.

To transfer their technical expertise into brand-building, these artists are in need of support. Working with Hindsgaul to develop her brand are Alissa Sullivan and Leslie Hendin, the founders of California-based fragrance brand Liis, who each own a stake. For the products’ light scent, they helped enlist in-demand perfumier Jérôme Epinette, known for developing cult fragrances like Sol de Janeiro’s Cheirosa 62 and Byredo’s Gypsy Water.

“I definitely knew from the beginning that this is new for me, and I needed somebody with a lot of experience,” said Hindsgaul. Another stakeholder in the brand is Hindsgaul’s husband, Stranger Things co-creator Matt Duffer, who she met when she joined the show. He is hands-off, apart from being a “great guinea pig” by testing its products.

“He was like, ‘This is yours, completely.’ But since we are together and married, if I do something, it also involves him,” she said.

The brand is launching exclusively direct-to-consumer to start, with plans to roll out in salons and specialty retailers next year. Hindsgaul is likely not done with the hair of Stranger Things universe, as she said plans to work on future Duffer brothers projects. A Nancy Wheeler-centered spinoff novel was announced by Netflix and Penguin Random House last week, spurring speculation that it could be fodder for a new series.

From Art to Commerce

Hindsgaul had done film and TV hair for over a decade when Winona Ryder, who had worked with the hairstylist in the past, recommended her for the job of hair department lead for Stranger Things.

With two Emmy nominations for hairstyling, Hindsgaul has refined the show creators’ vision for the characters’ looks from the first season. Brown’s character Eleven, for example, was initially written to be completely bald before Hindsgaul intervened to create her signature buzz cut.

“I was so scared — terrified. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I am going to shave this little girl’s hair off,’” she said, recalling that Brown was “just laughing” during the process.

She dreamt up the idea for Hindsgaul Hair five years into working on Stranger Things. The brand is not so much about on-screen looks as it is about protecting performers’ hair and scalps after being teased into oblivion or pulled tight under wigs for long shoot days. Drawing heavily from 1980s yearbooks for her hairstyle research, she’d occasionally use samples of her new products for onscreen use, such as her dry shampoo to ward off actors’ sweat from 105-degree filming days in Atlanta. But the crispy curls of the time period often called for something stronger.

“When we needed something to look period-correct, we would often go to the period-correct products,” she said. For the chaotic hair of Mrs. Wheeler in Season 5, for example, “we wanted it to look fried, so that’s Suave.” Her own mousse was too “gentle” for the look, she noted.

The line’s next product in the works is shampoo. But one that Hindsgaul maintains is a “no” for the time being is a 1980s staple: hairspray.

“That is not even on my list,” she said.