Intercosmo

Intercosmo is a professional hair-care brand made for hairdressing salons, offering hair colour, care, styling and perm products together with training and business support for stylists. It is part of the Revlon group: Revlon named Intercosmo among the professional brands it gained when it completed its purchase of The Colomer Group in October 2013 [16], and the brand's own website still describes it as a Revlon brand [7].

The company presents itself less as a product line than as what it calls a "platform of professional hairdressing solutions", built around advice, education, salon tools and products. Its best-known lines are the permanent colour Voilà 3C Intense and the ammonia-free colour Nutrilux. Its main website addresses the Spanish market, and its most recent visible public activity dates from 2022 and 2023.

Intercosmo says it has spent "more than 70 years" drawing inspiration from, creating for and learning from hairdressers, a claim made on its about page as last updated in March 2023 [2]. Beyond that statement, the company's own website does not tell the story of its early decades, and its founders are not publicly documented.

The best-documented turning point is the change of ownership in 2013, when the brand passed to Revlon along with the rest of The Colomer Group (see Ownership below). In the same period, Spanish hairdressing trade media covered the brand's work with salon professionals. In March 2013 the hairdresser Antonio Bellver gave a series of creative workshops in Spain exclusively for Intercosmo's salon clients. In February 2015 the trade site Tupelu reported that Intercosmo had signed a collaboration agreement with the bridal fashion designer Jordi Dalmau, making the brand official sponsor of Jordi Dalmau Novias [14].

From around 2020 the brand's public face shifted towards seasonal trend collections, each built around named looks and exact Voilà shade recipes. The website presents BOUNDLESS for autumn-winter 2020, HER ENERGY for spring-summer 2021, CURLYAGE for spring-summer 2022 and POPUP for spring-summer 2023. In October 2022 the company held a two-day professional event in Seville, Intercosmo InEvent Sevilla 2022, which the trade press described as a look at the future of the salon business.

Intercosmo belongs to Revlon. On 9 October 2013, Revlon Consumer Products Corporation announced that it had completed its acquisition of The Colomer Group for a cash price of $665 million [16]. The announcement listed Revlon Professional, Intercosmo, Orofluido and UniqOne as the key professional hair-care brands in the deal, alongside CND nail products and the American Crew men's grooming range. It described The Colomer Group as a beauty company with about $500 million in annual net sales, roughly half of them in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Accounts differ slightly on the date and the price. Wikipedia's article on Revlon places the purchase in August 2013 at $660 million [10], and a retailer's brand profile of Intercosmo also dates the takeover to August 2013 [11]. August matches the signing of the deal, while October 2013 is the date Revlon gave for its completion. This article follows the completion announcement for the date and the $665 million figure.

The link to Revlon remains visible more than a decade later. Intercosmo's education page calls it a brand "of the Revlon group" [7], its customer-service email address sits on a Revlon domain, and a Spanish online retailer also describes it as belonging to the Revlon group [13]. Within the group, its sister brands include Orofluido, CND and American Crew from the same 2013 acquisition, as well as Elizabeth Arden, Cutex, Halston and d:fi.

Intercosmo sells to professionals rather than directly to consumers. The company describes itself as "the ideal partner for professional hairdressers" and says that salons working with it offer high quality and creative solutions suited to their clients' needs. Its offer is organised into four pillars: advice, in the form of close commercial support for the salon as a business; training, through a development plan led by educators and hairdressers; tools that help salons personalise the client experience; and a range of salon products.

Colour sits at the centre of this model. The company calls itself a leader and reference point in colour and hair-fashion trends, and it promotes its own colouring techniques alongside an image-consultancy method for salons called the Smart Color Method. According to Intercosmo, these tools help its partner salons stand out from competitors. The trend collections serve the same purpose: each look is published with the exact shades and mixes used, so that stylists can reproduce it.

Education is a large part of the brand's public activity. Its training and events programme is called Infinity, which the company presents as a way for stylists to push both their creativity and their business further. Spanish trade media have covered its events for salon clients, from Antonio Bellver's workshops in 2013 to the 2022 gathering in Seville.

On product development, Intercosmo says its formulas are created in its research and development laboratory by a specialised team and tested for efficiency, effectiveness, functionality and sensory feel [2]. A brand description carried by an Italian online retailer adds that each product goes through three phases of testing before release [12].

Voilà 3C Intense is the brand's permanent hair colour and the core of its colour range. The "3C" refers to the three goals the company names for it: coverage, colour and "cosmeticity", meaning how the hair looks and feels after colouring. Intercosmo attributes these results to three in-house technologies [5]. The Color Symphony System balances primary and secondary pigments for intense colour and grey coverage. The Hydromix System adds a conditioner with hydrolysed keratin and keratin amino acids so that hair stays soft after colouring. The Red Couple System is designed for deep, long-lasting reds and coppers. The company says the formula contains only a minimal amount of ammonia and that the range spans more than 100 shades. A sub-family called Superlight covers high-lift blonde shades, with one series lightening natural hair by up to five tones and another by more.

Nutrilux is the brand's colour without ammonia or PPD (para-phenylenediamine, a common dye ingredient that some people react to). Intercosmo says it uses ingredients of natural origin, including macadamia oil, sweet rush oil and rosehip oil, which it describes as rich in fatty acids and antioxidants. The company states that the formula reaches up to 100% grey coverage without ammonia [8], depending on hair type. Its shades are grouped into natural-looking families with names such as Precious Woods, Sun Rays and Pearls, and all of them can be mixed with one another. Nutrilux shades are mixed with one of four developer emulsions, from Nutri 0, a tone-on-tone option with no lightening power, to Nutri 3, which lightens by up to three tones.

Il Magnifico 10 is a leave-in spray mask. When a matching shampoo joined the line in 2014, Spanish trade press called the original product the first spray mask on the market [14]. The rest of the current range includes the Color&Shine care line of shampoo, mask and booster; the Voilà Technics technical products, including the Hair R-Build repair treatment; the IC Create styling range of gel, mousse, cream and serum; hair sprays, including an Eco version; and the Perm In permanent-wave system.

The colour ranges also appear in professional education outside the brand's own channels. In January 2015 the Spanish salon magazine Revista Coiffure published a step-by-step colour technique for the "Rive Gauche" trend, using Voilà 3C copper and mahogany shades mixed with Voilà developer cream [15].

No third-party certifications, awards or patents are publicly documented for the brand.

Intercosmo is an acquired brand that continues as part of the Revlon group, trading under its own name in the professional salon channel. Its public presence has been quiet in recent years. The latest update to its about page dates from March 2023, the newest trend collection on its website is POPUP for spring-summer 2023, the site footer still reads "Copyright 2012 - 2022", and the most recent trade-press coverage is of the InEvent Sevilla gathering in October 2022. No brand news, launches or website updates from after March 2023 are publicly documented. The brand maintains accounts on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook under the Intercosmo Spain name.