Bleach London

Bleach London is a British haircare and hair-colour brand based in London, best known for at-home bleach kits, toners and vivid semi-permanent and permanent dyes sold alongside a small chain of salons. It grew out of a colour-focused salon that opened in Dalston in 2010 [3] and now sells professional-style colour products for home use, describing its range as vegan and cruelty-free. The brand remains active, having marked its fifteenth year in 2025 and continued to launch products and expand internationally.

The company positions itself around bold, unconventional colour as a form of self-expression, and has deliberately kept that polarising identity rather than broadening its appeal. Its products are sold through mass retailers in the United Kingdom and the United States and, more recently, in further international markets.

Bleach London began with hairdresser Alex Brownsell, who bleached and coloured friends' hair — at first over a kitchen sink — before the work grew into a business. According to an interview with Brownsell, she and her friend and client Sam Teasdale (later Sam Campbell) "scraped together £6,000" for a chair, a mirror and a laptop after Sharmadean Reid offered them space at the back of the WAH Nails salon [5]. From that single chair the pair opened a dedicated colour salon in Dalston in 2010 [3], which the brand's own account describes as a salon focused on colour rather than cutting.

Accounts of the founding team differ. A 2025 Dazed feature lists three founders — Alex Brownsell, Sam Campbell (née Teasdale) and Lou Teasdale, Sam's sister and a celebrity hairstylist [3] — while the Into The Gloss interview frames the venture as Brownsell together with Sam Teasdale [5]. Bleach London's own site names Alex Brownsell as co-founder. The founding year is similarly uneven in the sources: editorial coverage consistently dates the salon's opening to 2010 [3], though the company's own history page does not state a founding year.

After the salon opened, the brand moved quickly into retail. It ran a Topshop pop-up in 2011 and launched a full product line with Boots in 2013 [3]. Physical expansion followed later, with a Los Angeles salon opening in 2021 and the brand describing four specialist salons across London and Los Angeles.

The larger growth came through retail distribution. Forbes reported in 2023 that the company had launched in the United States after raising over £10 million in investment, with products available in some 16,000 stores globally, an expansion across 3,500 Walmart locations, placement secured at CVS, and a soft launch in China via Taobao while building a presence on Douyin [4]. In 2024 the brand introduced a "No Bleach" permanent colour range [4], and press coverage around its fifteenth anniversary in 2025 noted planned expansions into South Africa and the Netherlands for 2026 [3].

Bleach London frames unconventional hair colour as self-expression rather than conventional attractiveness. Brownsell has said the brand is "for you, not for being sexy," describing an anti-establishment stance from a period when brightly coloured hair was still controversial [3]. She has also described the label as intentionally polarising — "not everyone is going to like green hair or blue hair" — and said the founders "haven't tried to dilute it or become more commercial" [5]. The company presents its products as professional salon-standard colour brought to home users, and states that its range is vegan and PETA-approved with recycled and recyclable packaging.

The brand's catalogue centres on bleach and toner kits, semi-permanent and permanent dyes, and care products aimed at bleached and coloured hair. Named products include the Reincarnation bond-restoring mask, the White Toner Kit, and, from 2024, the "No Bleach" permanent colour range. Bleach London is also credited with popularising colour techniques such as dip-dye and "recession roots".

On the technical side, Brownsell has described developing Alex-Plex, a bond treatment said to work within the colouring process to help strengthen the hair, and a Hair Elixir said to seal and protect split ends [5]. The company has said it tests products in its own salon, sometimes across many clients over a period of months.

The brand's early clients included Florence Welch, Alice Dellal and Pixie Geldof, and its coloured-hair styles were later associated with figures such as Kylie Jenner, Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj as the trend spread more widely. It has been the subject of features in Dazed and Forbes and an early founder interview in Into The Gloss.

The brand's name, shared with Nirvana's debut album Bleach, drew copyright-related criticism tied to the band. According to Dazed, Courtney Love publicly defended Bleach London against that criticism [3].

Bleach London is an active, independently owned company; no parent company or acquisition is documented. It continued to launch products and widen its retail footprint through the early 2020s, marked its fifteenth anniversary in 2025, and had further international expansion planned for 2026 [3].