With no ad budget, he went on a British TV show to demonstrate a thickening lotion, applying it to a model's roots and then blow-drying. The results had viewers flooding the phone lines. "The presenter had to ask people to please stop calling," he says. "Boots (the drugstore chain) asked for 1.2 million bottles. And I was running the company from my basement."

On shelves, the lotion cost the equivalent of six or seven dollars, at least twice what other hair products were selling for. What Frieda learned was that women were willing to pay more money for their hair care, especially when it came to frizz.

Another Frieda theory: Treat hair care like skin care, with different products for different types. Until he launched Frizz-Ease in 1991, "there was nothing for frizzy hair, no one even said 'frizz,'" Frieda says. "We created the category."

Frieda launched other products later, some successful, some not. The 1998 launch of Sheer Blonde was his next big winner. "We had questionnaires, and all the blondes were answering differently from the brunettes," he says. "They were saying, 'I don't want to put anything on that will dull my hair.'"

Frizz-Ease remains widely popular and the top seller of the John Frieda line.

"Almost every brand has a product that competes with Frizz-Ease," says Monica Tang, a retail strategist with Kurt Salmon Associates. "Straight hair is still all the rage these days." And frizz remains the No. 1 complaint among women, according to a study Allure did a couple of years ago.

That would surprise no one less than Frieda, who scoffs at the notion that women might ever be ready to embrace the inner wildness of their hair shafts. "Tell me a time," he challenges the questioner, "when women DIDN'T want to control their frizz."

And so I leave, like the others, with a sample of serum, newly aware of my latent frizz. "Hair is really difficult to control," Frieda tells me. "But it's not rocket science. At the end of the day, it's just techniques—and a good product."
 

All images courtesy of the Fashion Spot forums.