Cyndia Harvey: Growing up in Jamaica, in my mother’s hair salon, beauty was what I saw around me: powerful, matriarchal women. I remember the care that these women put into how they dressed; it was about pride and ritual. It didn’t have to be about something ‘beautiful’. It would be rooted in something everyday. For example, I would always take pride in making sure my school shoes looked the best they could. That’s where I find beauty, in the mundane.

Isamaya Ffrench: When most people ask that, they’re asking, ‘What do you find cosmetically beautiful?’ But to Cyndia’s point, beauty is a whole different thing. I didn’t grow up in a matriarchy; it was the opposite. Everyone in my family was an engineer. There were no cosmetics in the house. I would go out and fix cars with my dad and help him build stuff. I felt very comfortable in that masculine environment. Beauty is about problem-solving; the industry is about solving problems through creativity – and that’s my engineering side coming out.

Cyndia Harvey: Beauty in the cosmetic sense is a luxury and a privilege. I grew up in quite a difficult situation and I started hairdressing as a way to escape. I had no idea about fashion. I only knew about hair within a salon context.

Isamaya Ffrench: I was studying art and product design, and doing a face-painting job on the side. It got around that I could do body painting, so I got asked to do a couple of shoots. I didn’t go straight into make-up; I did creative work with face paint. I wasn’t doing it in a Pat McGrath or Val Garland way. Instead, I was a young, naive person who didn’t care and was having fun. That’s why people were like, ‘Oh, this doesn’t feel very industry.’ Of course, that’s what the work looked like; I was uneducated and using fucking face paints. I didn’t even know what i-D was. Magazines just weren’t my world.

Cyndia Harvey: Assisting Sam McKnight opened a lot of doors for me. As a Black woman, I could never have done that independently. When I started to work on my own, it was easier as people like Tim Walker already trusted me, and that was through Sam. I’ve always really respected someone like you, Isamaya, because you are someone who just came in. You didn’t have any background, but you had a vision from the first day and basically inspired an entire generation about make-up.

Isamaya Ffrench: Thank you. It’s interesting having this conversation with Cyndia because we’ve had very different paths. One thing I know for sure is that I don’t like doing what has been done before. So, whether I was into make-up or not, I would have never gone down the route of doing traditional make-up.

Isamaya Ffrench: Only now with the brand have I thought that I need to do things differently, but that’s about instinct, not having some comment or opinion on what everyone else is doing. I don’t think that it’s ever been a driving force for my approach to work. I have never seen work as a rebellion.

Cyndia Harvey: I agree it’s about pure instinct. It just so happens that our instinct drives a different conversation and makes people think. I’m not an activist, and just because our core consumer is an underrepresented group doesn’t mean it’s an activist brand. In interviews, people want to say I’m fighting for something. I am a Black woman, so that’s naturally going to come out in the work; it’s just intrinsic.

Isamaya Ffrench: I did an interview recently, and someone asked me, ‘Is this a gender-neutral make-up line?’ I said, ‘It can look good on both boys and girls.’ Then the whole tagline around the interview was ‘Isamaya’s gender-fluid make-up line’, and I was like, ‘They have really missed the mark there.’ I felt really sad. We didn’t talk about sustainability or packaging, or the many other important things. I’m about make-up for anyone, but I’m not pushing an agenda.

Isamaya Ffrench: The way I do things often gets called out for being ‘anti-beauty’. What does that even mean? Beauty is personal and subjective, and the way I am approaching it is more anti-industry. Not to reject things, but just to do things differently. I’ve had amazing collaborations with brands, but ultimately it’s never your own vision. I also wanted to be part of the brand and embody it. Charlotte Tilbury is part of her brand; Pat McGrath, too, although she does it through models. That’s why I am in the visuals. Audiences want to be inspired and unfortunately, the majority of the time, you’re restricted by certain parameters or commercial constraints, which just totally dilute creativity. I just wanted limitless creativity.

Isamaya Ffrench: Symbolically, BDSM fitted into that idea of what make-up can do for you and set the tone for the brand: confidence and self-possession. I didn’t want to do something that felt typically commercial. This collection speaks to people who feel they can be more of their authentic selves with this style of make-up.

Cyndia Harvey: It was more about a personal need to have a brand like this, rather than a need to change an antiquated industry. I work with a lot of high-profile clients, I live a certain lifestyle, and I buy into brands like Barbara Sturm and Augustinus Bader, but there’s no elevated experience for textured hair. Let’s not forget the influence Black hair has had on culture. Yet, Black people are not front and centre when you think of a luxury brand. I didn’t just want to launch a brand with an influential platform. This is rooted in something far bigger. It’s an opportunity for me to innovate in a space where no one else is, whether through product, messaging, brand experience or even what a brand can look like, and not just for Black people’s hair, but for hair in general.

Cyndia Harvey: People can connect with make-up instantly – it’s so visceral – but haircare brands don’t have that same kind of charm. So that was the challenge: how do we make people as excited and devoted to a haircare brand as they are to their make-up brands?

Isamaya Ffrench: You’ve got a wicked logo, Cyndia; I love it. I’m quite jealous.

Cyndia Harvey: Thank you. It was inspired by old African systems. The colour palette was taken from the orange top and green skirt that Angela Davis wore when she was interviewed after being wrongly incarcerated in 1972. For the campaign, we thought there was something quite punk about launching a haircare brand with people without any hair. As a brand, we celebrate everyone as they are.

Cyndia Harvey: It is, but it shouldn’t be. Why does this brand only exist in 2022? Why haven’t these products been available for this consumer before? It’s important for brands to be inclusive, but that does not mean that one product fits the entire mould. I know that if I use a certain product for all hair types in the way that the marketing tells me, I will fuck my hair up.

Isamaya Ffrench: It’s about being transparent. I don’t think there are any rules. You need to be conscious but inspiring, as so much stuff looks the same. It’s also important to keep your eye on things like sustainability. It’s very hard to do interesting and complicated stuff that isn’t extortionately expensive, while also being good for the environment and using recyclable materials. We have a sustainability consultant now who’s helping with our long-term goals. Our drops are going to be in limited runs and I want these items to have a second life.

Cyndia Harvey: I agree. It’s about transparency. We don’t want to be this huge L’Oréal type of brand; we want to be conscious and give our consumers the essentials. Quality over quantity. Anyone can create a brand and just buy a formula off the shelf, but every single ingredient at T.H.O.M has been researched by myself and our chemists. It’s built from the vision up.

Isamaya Ffrench: I want to liberate people from how we look at and consume make-up. I want to show that you can be inventive, that there are other ways to do make-up, to do a make-up brand, to do make-up campaigns.

Cyndia Harvey: We want to be a globally successful brand that changes the way people think about haircare. We also want to change the face of luxury in all categories. To think too far ahead is distracting, but we want to make a real and lasting change.