There comes a point in midlife when our bodies quietly ask us to pay attention to details we have spent decades overriding. While skincare and daily facial routines get endlessly celebrated, our hair and scalp — the crowns we carry — are often the very first places to register internal shifts, stress, and hormonal change. Yet, so few of us give our hair the scientific rigor or sensory ritual it genuinely deserves in perimenopause.
In this conversation, I am joined by Janice Taylor, four-time founder, author, and co-founder of Esther & Ruth. Born from a decade of personal research into her own perimenopausal hair health, Janice created Esther & Ruth to bridge high-level active science with a deeply luxurious daily ritual. Grounded in the heritage stories of Esther (“born for such a time as this”) and Ruth (“where you go, I go”), her brand is a movement for women in midlife to reject cultural narratives around ageing, reclaim sovereignty over their self-worth, and honour the season they are in.
Join us as we explore the connection between scalp health and internal wellbeing, the formulation challenges of clean beauty that actually works, and what happens when a woman stops auditioning for validation and finally steps into the pure essence of who she is today.
The origin story of Esther & Ruth touches on the deep connection between skin health, wellness, and self-care. What was the personal pivotal moment that made you realise standard skincare wasn’t addressing the true needs of women, and how did that spark the founding of your brand?
The pivotal moment that sparked the brand was really a moment where I thought, I’ve got to figure out my own way in the world. I had launched another company, Wilson 4Q, and it was still a way off from being funded, and I thought, I’ve got to do something more. People are always commenting on my hair. One day I went to a restaurant, and two of the women serving there asked me about it. As I was walking home, I thought, hold on a second. I have obsessively researched and created my own formulas for the last decade to turn my hair around in perimenopause. Why don’t I do this now? Before I even got home, I had the answer: I was going to make a perimenopausal hair care company. I knew I wanted to honour God, and I knew that a lot of women had walked away from faith. So I thought, let me use two women in the Bible who have books dedicated to them, Esther and Ruth, and their stories. And that’s how Esther & Ruth was born.
Your brand name carries a powerful sense of heritage and legacy. What is the deeper story behind the names Esther & Ruth, and how do those women or their principles guide your philosophy today?
The beautiful story behind the name is that Esther and Ruth are two women in the Bible who anchor their own books. The women of the Bible are often overshadowed by the very dominant male figures, but these two stand on their own.
Esther was “born for such a time as this.” She hid a part of her identity, and it wasn’t known. She was known for her crown and her beauty, and for how she waited in stillness and quiet, even sitting with Haman, the man who was plotting the death of her people. That notion of waiting, being patient, and sitting in your beautiful essence is the story of Esther, and it’s what we want every woman to feel.
Ruth’s story is fascinating too. She had married Naomi’s son, and after he died, Naomi told her to go and make a new life for herself. But Ruth said, “Where you go, I go.” Hers is a story of loyalty and of women standing by each other across generations. She worked her fingers to the bone in the fields to support her mother-in-law.
So “born for such a time as this” and “where you go, I go” are the two foundational elements of Esther & Ruth.
On your Science page, you dive into formulation purity and evidence-backed ingredients. How do you bridge the gap between high-level scientific integrity and creating a luxurious, sensory daily ritual for your customers?
Our skincare is already a luxurious daily routine. We wash, we cleanse, we tone, we apply our actives, we moisturise. But we’ve never really given the same thought and attention to our hair. And yet the science is there, and so is the ritual. So much is happening in the layers of our skin, our scalp and our hair.
At Esther & Ruth, we wanted to bring together the best actives to support hair fall, hair growth and the integrity of the hair, while also making the experience feel luxurious and beautiful, celebrating this season of life, so that it becomes a ritual.
So it’s two parts. One part is the system: there’s real science to taking care of your scalp and your hair, from the inside out. The other part is the ritual: using this as an act of love for yourself.
Skincare can often feel like a landscape of overwhelming trends, endless steps, and empty promises. What core misstep do you see women making in their skincare routines, and how does Esther & Ruth offer a simpler, more effective path?
The core mistake women make is that we’ve given so much attention to our skin and our faces, because that’s what people see, and very little attention to what’s going on with our scalp, our hair and its growth. Our hair is often the first signal that something inside us could be awry, whether that’s our iron, our insulin, our diet, alcohol or sleep. It all shows up in our hair.
There’s lots of science and conversation about skin, but very little community understanding of our hair: what it does for us, the crown we carry, and everything that shows up at the top of our head. That’s what we’re pioneering and bringing forward with Esther & Ruth.
There’s the famous saying that death and taxes are the only two certainties. But when it comes to women and ageing, we treat it like a plague, like something we should be ashamed of. Yet there is so much beauty in ageing: our wisdom, our confidence, our rootedness, birthing children if that’s the path you’ve taken, and watching them grow into young women and young men. There are so many rites of passage in ageing.
Culturally, though, we’ve looked at women ageing through a lens of “Oh, isn’t that terrible? She’s ageing.” We’re here to change that script completely. Every single person, man or woman, goes through the seasons of life. What we’re here to say is that this is a season to celebrate. We can celebrate it through rooted rituals, through loving ourselves, through celebrating who we are and taking care of ourselves on the inside. Hair care, and the ritual around it, is one place where we begin to reclaim that.
Formulating with non-toxic, potent active ingredients requires a careful balance of nature and science. What was one of the biggest formulation challenges you faced while bringing your product line to life, and how did you refuse to compromise on quality?
The biggest formulation challenge is creating products that smell and feel great on our hair and skin without relying on cheap ingredients. Those can give you the instant gratification of something that feels good, but it’s loaded with silicones, or it smells wonderful, but the fragrance irritates a sensitive scalp. There’s a balance to strike between actives that genuinely work and improve your hair and its structure, and all the cosmetic products out there that just make it feel nice in the moment.
The hardest part is that most hair care products, especially styling products, are made as if everyone’s hair is the same. The hairspray, mousse or root lifter you’re offered at 45 or 50 is the same one a 15- or 20-year-old would use. That’s a really big gap. So it’s not only a formulation challenge. It’s an area where there’s a lot of research to be done and a lot of understanding we can bring to these product lines.
You place a strong focus on clean beauty that works. What does “clean beauty” mean to you personally in a market where that phrase is often overused or greenwashed?
Clean beauty, for me, means first and foremost celebrating who you are in your nature and who you were born to be. It’s all about what’s natural. If we’re always trying to change ourselves, to look like something different, or to ignore the season of life we’re in, then we’re not really living out clean beauty. So clean beauty is also natural beauty.
The other part of clean beauty is the products and the actives. There are so many products on the market, and there have been great advances in technology that help us understand which products can work for us, not against us. Yet many products aren’t formulated for this season of life, for perimenopausal women. You can find a great product, but it’s loaded with other things that may harm us or aren’t good for our hair, our bodies or our skin. So it’s about finding that balance.
And finally, clean beauty is about sovereignty and ownership of self.
For many women, applying skincare is one of the few moments in a busy day spent entirely with themselves. How do you hope using Esther & Ruth shifts a woman’s internal relationship with her self-care and self-worth?
Esther & Ruth shifts a woman’s relationship with self-care and self-worth because we’re not asking her to be anything other than exactly who she is. It’s a true internal journey and a celebration of her roots. Hence our message: new season, same roots.
Every decade, and even every year, carries us into a new chapter and a new season of life. But at our core, in our essence, we are all deeply connected, and each of us is also deeply unique. So the question is: how do we celebrate that rooted self, go inward, and stop looking outside ourselves for validation or for the idea that we all need to look the same?
That’s why we’ve named our products after women: women in the Bible and women in history, through our heritage line. We’re saying that you have an inner Ruth, which is loyalty, and an inner Esther, which is knowing you were born for such a time as this. Those inner qualities unite us, and they also make you uniquely you. Our stance in the beauty industry is about celebrating the individual while still recognising how connected we all are.
Building a brand grounded in both science and story requires immense dedication and vision. What has creating Esther & Ruth taught you about your own resilience, identity, and personal reinvention?
I’ve been in the tech industry for 17 years. Some would say I’ve been on the masculine side of the world, in professional sports and AI technology, doing really hardcore, heavy work. Pivoting now into what I’d call my feminine side is, again, a celebration of being a woman and of the season of life we’re in. It’s our “new season, same roots” story.
At the same time, it’s about recognising that we have both energies within us, the masculine and the feminine. We want to be in business, but we still want to be the women we were born to be.
In this short amount of time, Esther & Ruth have already taught me so much about being open. It’s also shown me that as a culture, and particularly in the beauty industry, we’re addicted to judging how people should look, what they should say, what they should do and who they should be. We’re hoping to pop the balloon on that judgemental side of the beauty industry, so that we can make a real impact and help women celebrate who they are, and celebrate together.
If you could give every woman one piece of wisdom about honouring her skin, her beauty, and her age on her own terms, what would you want her to remember?
The one piece of wisdom I’d like every woman to have is this: this is who you are. You were born this way. You were given your name; you were born into your own root story, with your beautiful genetic makeup and your DNA. So part of this season of life, even though it’s a new season, is to own who you are.
Ownership of the self is the greatest wisdom we can gain as each new season comes. As we age, it’s about saying “I am this person,” owning who you are and loving every part of yourself as you are today. Not who you were 10 or 20 years ago, and not who you’ll be 10 years from now, but who you are today.
Because the moment you stand in that sovereignty of self-love and own every part of yourself — the shadow side, the darkness, the past, the mistakes, the regrets, all of those seasons — you get to rise. You rise into the pure essence of who you are. And that’s really what we’re here to do at Esther & Ruth.
Janice’s reflections are a powerful reminder that midlife isn’t a season of apologetic retreat — it is an invitation to stand firmly in our self-sovereignty and own every chapter that has brought us here. When we stop treating self-care as a cosmetic fix for a “problem” and start honouring our daily care as a sacred ritual of self-love, our entire relationship with ageing transforms.
Whether you are navigating hair changes in perimenopause, unlearning the cultural fear of getting older, or stepping into your own powerful pivot, keep Janice’s core wisdom close: new season, same roots. You were born for such a time as this.
Janice’s reflections are a powerful reminder that midlife isn’t a season of apologetic retreat — it is an invitation to stand firmly in our self-sovereignty and own every chapter that has brought us here. When we stop treating self-care as a cosmetic fix for a “problem” and start honouring our daily care as a sacred ritual of self-love, our entire relationship with ageing transforms.
Whether you are navigating hair changes in perimenopause, unlearning the cultural fear of getting older, or stepping into your own powerful pivot, keep Janice’s core wisdom close: new season, same roots. You were born for such a time as this.
JANICE BIO
Janice Taylor is a Canadian entrepreneur, author and four-time founder who believes women deserve to be celebrated through every season of life. She is the co-founder of Esther & Ruth, a perimenopause hair care brand created for the years when hair, hormones and sense of self can shift at once. Inspired by her own hair journey and the rituals that helped her through a period of rebuilding, she created the brand to help women care for themselves without treating ageing as something to apologise for.
Currently completing graduate studies at Harvard, Janice also founded Wilson4Q, where her work focuses on emotional fitness. Esther & Ruth draws its name from the biblical stories of courage and loyalty, while its commitment to women starting over honours her mother, Marilyn Joan Hadfield, who raised three daughters on minimum wage and still made room for beautiful things. That legacy inspires the brand’s Grace Field Fund.
Learn more about Esther & Ruth at estherandruth.com and follow @estherandruthhaircare on Instagram.
Connect with Janice at linktr.ee/janicetaylor.