‘If our hair doesn’t look good we don’t feel good’: Anabel Kingsley on her hair treatment specialists

Taking over her father’s ‘baby’, Anabel Kingsley has pushed the family firm to be the leading hair specialist in the world, especially because she occasionally loses her own hair, writes Andy Martin

‘I was born bald and then I started using Philip Kingsley products,’ says Kingsley (Philip Kingsley)

Anabel Kingsley, as befits a trichologist, has a wonderful, radiant head of hair, strawberry blond with highlights. But she doesn’t always. She contracted a condition (ulcerative colitis) in her twenties that, from time to time, causes her hair to fall out. “When I tell my clients I know how you feel,” she says, “I really do know how they feel.” Which partly explains how she came to follow in her father’s footsteps to head up Philip Kingsley, the hair treatment specialists, with clinics in London and New York and celebrity customers, including Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow.

I have to apologise for my own dysfunctional haircut when we meet, having attempted a bit of DIY barbering with a handy pair of kitchen scissors. “Most people have a good sense of humour about their hair,” says Kingsley. “Until something goes wrong with it. Then they don’t.”

Anabel Kingsley grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with an American singer-psychoanalyst mother and an English trichologist father. Philip Kingsley – she calls him “the hair guru” – had gone to New York in the Eighties to open a clinic there. “I was born bald and then I started using Philip Kingsley products,” says Kingsley, laughing.