Kelvin°

Your Hair. No Matter Where.

Role: Co-creative director & Designer

Description: Sustatinable packaging/haircare

Year: 2024 - 2 weeks

My Identity crisis

Close-up of a woman with curly hair, green eyes, wearing a gold nose ring, a white turtleneck, and a gray blazer inside a vehicle.
A person with curly brown hair and a nose ring wearing a dark zip-up sweatshirt, taking a selfie indoors with a framed artwork on the wall behind them.

My East Coast curls

My early Colorado curls

Sorry for the cringey selfies, but this was the difference between my East Coast hair and my Colorado hair. Growing up in Philadelphia, where the humidity is always at a disgusting 80% in the summers, my curls were used to being hydrated. It wasn’t until I moved to Colorado in 2023 that I first experienced my curls fall flat. It felt like no matter what routine I tried, I could never get my staple curly mop back.

Hair Dresser Wisdom

It took months for me to find a hairdresser who could bring my hair back to life. She explained that the climates are so different that I would have to change my routine to cater to the new factors. Colorado is hot in the summer and frigid in the winters, its dry and at an extremely high elevation, ALL of these are factors. After getting my layers touched up, she showed me every product that she put in my hair, and I wondered how much longer I would have gone without my favorite part of myself if I hadn’t found her.

A young woman with curly brown hair, light skin, and a nose piercing, smiling softly, indoors with visible metal beams and ceiling vents in the background.

My hair now (in Colorado)

Recieving the breif

One of the first briefs we received was to create a sustainable self-care brand. Being so fresh off my curly roller coaster, I knew I wanted to work in the realm of climate-based hair care. In my partnership, we began brainstorming.

Our initial idea was to capture the varied climates with a worldly aesthetic. To embody that we played with the idea of packaging models after vintage luggage with branded stickers, PANAM type, and a bobbypin vessel for it to rest on.

Sketch of PINK products, including a logo, a packet labeled 'Refills,' and a box with labeled 'Air Sig' devices.

Sketches courtesy of my partner Mollie McCoy

Rerouting

Critiques told us that we were being too literal with our visuals, so we decided to start from square one. After spending some time researching symbols of movement, temperature, and migration, I realized that the answer was right in front of me the whole time. I isolated the idea of migration, just as I did from the East Coast to the mountains. I began using bird wings as our main iconography.

Three cans of Kelvin climate-based hair care products against a yellow background, with text indicating they are suitable for all hair types and dry desert climates. The cans feature graphic designs of wings and a cactus.
Packaging of Kelvin Arctic Cold Climates hair care products featuring a blue background, pink text, a winged ice formation illustration, and product ingredients list.

Cruising Altitude

The idea felt right, and it worked beautifully with the metal tins we decided to keep as the packaging. That way, not only would it present strongly on the shelf in the store, but as a keepsake on your vanity at home. Each tin would come with a pump that can be easily unscrewed to allow for refills that could be bought separately.

The Leave in

This one technically came from a brief, but the problem it tackled was something I’d been dealing with in my own life for a while. That personal connection made the whole process feel way more real. I wasn’t just designing for a hypothetical user; I was designing for me and people like me. Getting to work through a solution that actually felt meaningful was a huge reminder that this is what I want to be doing. Solving real problems, not just ticking boxes.