It's selling a product roughly every two minutes, it's added nearly 10,000 followers in a matter of months, and expats swear it's the first thing that's actually worked on their hair since they moved here.
Something's happening in Dubai bathrooms, and it's moving fast.
A homegrown haircare brand called Regrowth+ has gone from unknown to everywhere in a matter of months. It's added close to 10,000 social followers since launching, it's selling a product roughly once every two minutes, and the reviews landing on its posts all sound suspiciously similar: this is the first thing that's worked since I got here.
For a brand this young, that kind of pull usually means one of two things. Clever marketing, or a product that genuinely solves something people had quietly given up on. In Regrowth+'s case, the buzz is being driven by the second, and the story behind it is more interesting than the numbers.
First, the thing everyone got wrong
Ask around and you'll find a lot of people here already tried to fix their hair, by buying a shower filter.
It made sense. The water felt harsh, so people screwed a filter onto the showerhead, waited a month, felt no difference, and quietly decided the problem must be them.
It wasn't. Those filters are built to strip chlorine and rust, the stuff people complain about in European and American water. They don't touch the thing that's actually causing the damage here: the dissolved minerals. So the filter does its job, just not the job people bought it for, and another month goes by with hair that keeps thinning.
That gap, between what people think is wrong and what's actually wrong, is the whole reason Regrowth+ exists.
Why the water is the real culprit
Ask most people why their hair got worse after moving to the Gulf and they'll blame genes, stress, or age. Almost nobody blames the water. According to Regrowth+, that's exactly the mistake.
Most tap water in the region starts as seawater. Desalination takes out the salt, and the water that reaches your shower is unusually "hard," packed with dissolved minerals like calcium and magnesium, often several hundred PPM, well above what people are used to back home.
Those minerals don't rinse away. They build up an invisible film on your hair and scalp. That film is why hair here feels rough within a week, why colour fades faster, why your conditioner stopped pulling its weight, and why the pricey serum you brought from home suddenly does nothing. And because calcium and magnesium are dissolved in the water, no showerhead filter is going to catch them, which is why that earlier fix never worked.
"People blame themselves," says Hilal Kanafani, co-founder of the brand's parent company, ReX BioLabs. "They think they're ageing badly, or they picked the wrong shampoo, or they're just unlucky. They're not. They moved into a water supply their hair had never met before, and nobody told them."
The expats got there first
The loudest voices behind the brand's rise have been Dubai's expat community, the people who arrived from London, or somewhere with soft tap water, and watched their hair fall apart within months of landing.
They're the ones flooding the comments. They're also, in a few cases, professional models, several of whom have posted about the brand on their own accounts with no sponsorship, no contract, and no payment. The company says those posts can be verified on request.
"We didn't build a campaign around that," Kanafani says. "Someone's hair stopped falling out and they told people. That's the only kind of word of mouth that actually compounds."That word of mouth is what's showing up in the sales rhythm. A product leaving the shelf every couple of minutes, for a brand almost nobody had heard of a few months ago, is the kind of curve that gets other people in the industry asking questions.
Clean it off first, then feed it
Regrowth+'s answer is about order, and that's really the whole trick.
The shampoo starts with something called a chelating complex. Think of it as tiny magnets that grab the mineral build-up off your hair and scalp and wash it down the drain. Only once that layer is gone does the formula get to work with its actual actives, rosemary, caffeine, argan oil, shea butter.
"Everyone stacks good ingredients into a bottle," Kanafani says. "That's the easy part. If there's a mineral crust sitting between those ingredients and your scalp, you're paying for actives that never arrive. We built the cleaning step in first."The conditioner comes in behind it with castor oil, olive oil and vitamin B5, going onto hair that can finally absorb them. Customers tend to describe the result the same way: less hair in the drain, and a texture they hadn't felt since before they moved.
Made in the UAE, and only getting started
The brand is manufactured in the UAE, not imported and rebadged, and every order carries a 90-day money-back guarantee. Use it for three months, and if nothing changes, they refund it.
Regrowth+ is the flagship, but ReX BioLabs is hinting it's the first of several. More ranges built for the region's conditions, hydration, supplements, skincare, are in development, though none have been named yet.
"Hair was where the damage was most visible, so that's where we started," Kanafani says. "But the water doesn't only touch your hair. Neither does the heat. We're building the full system, one category at a time."For a market that spent years buying products made for someone else's climate, it's a different pitch. Not a slicker version of what's already on the shelf. Something built for the conditions people here actually live in.
About ReX BioLabs
ReX BioLabs is a Gulf-based consumer health company and the parent of Regrowth+. Its flagship system is engineered for the region's hard water conditions. Hydration, supplement and skincare ranges are in development. 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee. Made in the UAE.
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