Reimagining colour.

So this technology we speak of—how do we do it? We wish we could say it’s simple, but it actually took years of research, expert development, and fine-tuning. Like most hair color companies, we start with the basics, aka the colour wheel. It informs how we use “harmonious colour schemes,” “pure color,” and things like shade, tone, and tint to lay down the groundwork for our color formula. But we’re not the kind of company that settles for “what’s always worked.” We wanted to make it even better, so we took a step into the future by customising each hair colour bottle we create. And that’s where science and technology come in.

To pull this off, we built two totally unique components that together disrupt the whole hair colour industry. First, we created dual-patented software that enables us to create unique colour formula IDs. Then something else comes into play. The star of the show. The tour de force. Our do-it-all, label-making, colour-dispensing, bottle-capping, watch-out-world machine—Pollychrome.

Our Colour Editor.

You know the drill: you tell us about your hair history and colour goal, then we run with it to craft your custom shade. We do it by using our Colour Editor, which is able to tweak your colour with a level of customisation unseen in the industry. Think of it this way, your Colourist is the artist and the Colour Editor is their paintbrush. But instead of hand-mixing dye and eyeballing tones, our Colourists are trained to create coloUr virtually. How? Our engineers and coders turned colour into a language. Shade variations and pigments become characters and symbols that make up your colour formula ID. Using the Colour Editor, your Colourist references your photo and the info in your Colour Profile to determine your base colour. Then, they can formulate less than ¼ shade difference in things like “tone,” “warmth,” or “vibrancy,” all while factoring in your hair history and grays. It’s how they meet your exact specifications, to make your colour completely unique to you.

Polly Chrome.

So how does your custom colour go from numbers to, well, hair colour? Here’s where it gets really good. We built a mixing machine named Pollychrome, which means “many colours.” Polly speaks our language. Ok, so it doesn’t literally speak (we’re working on it) but it does communicate with our Colour Editor by taking your formula ID and putting it into action.

Here’s how it works: First, your personal Colourist creates your formula ID using our Colour Editor then hits “send.” It passes over to Polly, who prints that formula ID, your name, and the date on a label. That label gets placed onto an empty colour bottle and travels down a conveyer belt to the dispenser. A little scanner reads your label and triggers the precise amount of varied pigments and toner to be dispensed into your bottle, down to a single drop.

In fact, Polly is capable of dispensing over 2.2 octooctogintillion pigment variations (yup, that's a real number), all drawing from vats of colour that have been custom formulated by our experts right here, on-site. Each pigment dispensed is actually measured by weight (instead of volume like most places) on a high-grade medical scale (because we’re fancy). Then, your bottle is capped, packaged, and sent to its home—or apartment, or office, or wherever your hair desires.

A different kind of machine.

Polly may move each bottle effortlessly and with ease, but it’s actually a very complex machine. To create it, we had to push the boundaries of manufacturing. Most industrial machines are made to produce just a few colours in high volumes. That’s why most colour companies offer a range of 15-30 premade, premixed shades. But Polly is faced with the challenge of making each bottle from scratch, every single time, almost like a printer. Prior to Polly, we couldn’t find machinery that could pull something that bold off, so we designed the machine ourselves from the bottom up. From the labeler to the bottle capper, down to the pipes that distribute exact amounts of colour, we mean it when we say there’s nothing else like Pollychrome.

Making Polly compact.

What if you can get custom hair colour, dispensed from scratch right before your eyes? Well, now you can. We took our 50 ft industrial-sized machine and compressed it into a compact frame no bigger than your average ATM. What does this enable us to do? Bypass shipping times and allow our clients to have their custom colour dispensed on the spot. And a smaller machine does not mean less colour options—our compact Pollys are still capable of manufacturing with the same 1/10th-of-a-gram precision and replicability as our big machine at our HQ. The compact magic-maker opens new doors for clients to have their color crafted on demand—making the possibilities truly endless.