From Childhood Ritual to Modern Hair Care: Why I Still Oil My Hair

There are memories that stay with you not because they were extraordinary, but because they happened so often that they quietly became a part of you.

For me, it's the smell of warm oil on a Sunday morning.

My grandmother would heat it just enough so it felt comforting against the scalp. I'd sit on the floor while she parted my hair with her fingers, one neat section at a time, before slowly massaging the oil in. We rarely spoke much. The fan would hum in the background, the television would be on somewhere in the house, and for twenty minutes, everything felt unhurried.

Back then, I never thought of it as hair care.

It was simply what Sundays looked like.

It wasn't until years later, after moving to the United States, that I realised how unusual that ritual had become.

Hair care here felt... urgent.

Every bottle promised something bigger than the last. Thicker hair in thirty days. A miracle ingredient. A breakthrough formula. Every week there seemed to be another trend, another ingredient everyone was suddenly convinced would change their hair forever.

Some of it was backed by good science.

Some of it was simply good marketing.

What I missed wasn't an ingredient.

It was the feeling.

That idea stayed with me for a long time.

When I began building Devane, I wasn't trying to recreate my childhood. I knew the world had changed, and so had hair care. We understand the scalp differently today. We know more about peptides, the skin barrier and the biology of the hair follicle than we did even a decade ago.

I didn't want to ignore that.

But I also didn't want to lose something that had quietly survived for generations.

I've never believed tradition and science have to compete with each other.

Sometimes science simply catches up to traditions people have trusted for years.

That's why you'll find ingredients like Bhringraj and Amla sitting alongside peptides in our formulations. Not because Ayurveda needs validating, and not because modern science has all the answers.

Because I think both have something valuable to offer.

Why I Still Oil My Hair

People often ask me whether I still oil my hair.

I do.

Not because I expect it to transform my hair overnight.

And definitely not because I believe one product can solve every hair concern.

I still do it because it's one of the few moments in my week where I stop trying to be productive.

For ten or fifteen minutes, I don't reach for my phone. I don't answer emails. I don't scroll. I just sit there and massage my scalp.

Some weeks, I think that pause does as much for me as the oil itself.

That's something I don't think we talk about enough.

Hair care has become another thing we're trying to optimize. Another routine we're trying to perfect.

Maybe Hair Care Can Simply Be a Ritual

But maybe it doesn't have to be.

Maybe it can simply be a ritual.

Hair growth is complicated. Genetics matter. Hormones matter. Nutrition, stress and sleep all matter too. No honest brand should tell you otherwise.

What I do believe is that healthy hair begins with a healthy scalp. And healthy habits begin with consistency.

Looking back, I don't remember exactly which herbs my grandmother used or how long she massaged my hair.

I remember how the room felt.

I remember feeling cared for.

That's the feeling I've carried with me into Devane.

Not the exact recipe.

Not nostalgia for its own sake.

Just the belief that some rituals are worth keeping, even as we learn new ways of understanding why they work.

Because sometimes the things we inherit don't need reinventing.

They simply need remembering.