For much of the past two decades, beauty has treated collagen as both a structural protein and a revenue model. It’s added to morning coffee and pre-workout shakes and featured on every medspa menu, anchoring a global market valued at $11.4 billion in 2025 and projected to double by 2033. Elastin, meanwhile, has mostly lived in collagen’s shadow, usually added as an afterthought, if mentioned at all.
Leah Garcia noticed the separation long before she founded Nulastin—an elastin-renewal cosmetic brand offering topical products for hair, lashes, brows, and skincare—in 2016. Around 2012, while recovering from facial paralysis, a symptom of her Bell’s Palsy diagnosis, and navigating aging on television as a sports reporter, she was introduced to elastin, a restorative protein that gives skin its ability to bounce back, according to Garcia. In skin, elastin is the stretchy protein that lets tissues snap back into place. “I’d see the word elastin used in all sorts of pamphlets at my doctor’s office or medspas, but it was always collagen and elastin,” Garcia told BeautyMatter. “Elastin really wasn’t a standalone. I always call it the sister protein to collagen.”
A decade into building a brand around that sister protein, Garcia has finally secured what she’s been chasing for years. In August, the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology published a peer-reviewed study, conducted by the German research lab QIMA Life Sciences and funded by Nulastin, providing evidence that elastin plays a meaningful role in hair biology, distinct from collagen. Around the hair follicle, research suggests elastin acts more like an anchor, holding the follicle in place while hair is actively growing, which may help hair remain in the growth phase longer before it sheds.
If the findings are accurate, shedding isn’t only a matter of hormones or nutrition, but also of whether a follicle has enough elastin to stay anchored while it grows. That’s a question the haircare industry has barely asked, and it’s a notable one given how many women are dealing with hair loss.
In a 2022 study surveying 200 postmenopausal women (aged 50 to 65), 52.2% showed signs of female pattern hair loss, and 60% reported low self-esteem, which became more common as hair loss progressed. Women already drive roughly 70% of the revenue in hair loss treatment products, a market valued at $3.14 billion in 2026 and growing at a 7.19% CAGR.
Yet, elastin has been essentially absent from the conversation. Histologists first documented elastin in human hair follicles roughly 50 years ago, but “research interest in this area subsequently declined,” according to the peer-reviewed study. Part of the reason is scale. Elastin only makes up about 2%-4% of the dermis, the thick layer of skin just beneath the surface, so researchers and brands put their research dollars and marketing budgets into collagen, the far more abundant protein.
“It’s always been there,” said Dr. Charlyn Belluzzo, a Nulastin board member, investor, and scientific advisor with a career in pharmaceutical and medical research. “[The problem was] that it’s just not as large a prevalence of an element, so it did not get the attention.”
The new study focused on elastin, starting with an understanding of where the protein actually sits in the scalp. Using a fluorescent tag that makes elastin glow under the microscope, the QIMA team captured what the authors described as the first detailed look at elastin around human hair follicles. In the images, elastin lit up bright red, wrapping around the hair root, with most of it at the base.
“That's the bear hug that your follicle's getting with elastin,” Garcia said.
The researchers then tested Nulastin’s proprietary blend, which pairs a form of elastin with peptides, a growth factor, and botanical extracts, on hair follicles in the lab, comparing it against an ingredient commonly used in competitor lash growth serums. According to the study, Nulastin’s blend increased elastin around the follicles and significantly extended their growth phase. The other lash serum didn’t show the same effects—but neither made a significant difference in hair length during the short test.
That emphasis on keeping hair in its growth phase, rather than sprouting new strands, is central to how Garcia talks about the brand. “It truly is easier to keep the hair you have than to try to grow new hair,” Garcia said.
The findings, however, do come with caveats. The strand tests were conducted on follicles from four donors in a lab rather than directly on scalps, and Nulastin paid for the research. The company says pilot studies on real people’s scalps are underway, with results expected between later this year and early next year. “Giving people instant results is an expectation, but not necessarily realistic,” Dr. Belluzzo said. “It does take consistency and time, and that's the whole game of longevity.”
For Garcia, elastin was never really a science problem. It was “100% a business problem,” she said. “First I have to teach people what elastin is, what it does, why it’s essential and valuable and absolutely vital for their well-being.”
She has paid for that education almost entirely out of the brand’s revenue. Garcia bootstrapped Nulastin from 0 to $17.5 million in sales before hiring her first employee, and its only outside capital is a round of just over $1 million from friends, family, and a handful of angel investors in 2021, money she says she really didn’t need. The company has been profitable since day one, Garcia said. In 2023, Nulastin was pacing toward $25 million with plans to double. Though revenue hasn’t doubled the way those earlier projections suggested, Garcia said it’s still in that “$25 [million] range”—and she has goals to double it by next year.
The spending mix explains the pace. By Garcia’s estimate, paid media and marketing account for the largest share, at roughly 35% of revenue, while R&D sits at around 10%, though she says she’ll “immediately deploy funds” whenever a study needs to be done. Rather than raising capital to fuel customer acquisition, she has leaned on customer retention. “We don’t buy our customers,” she said. “We are an incremental growth company.” Subscribers generate about 65% of revenue and returning customers about 80%, and a subscriber’s lifetime value is $436 compared with $186 for a nonsubscriber.
The other major investment has been intellectual property. Garcia spent a couple of years acquiring a university co-owned elastin patent portfolio, then rewrote much of it for haircare once the company’s research validated its hypothesis. Nulastin now counts 31 patents. That science matters because of how beauty is regulated. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't approve cosmetics before they hit shelves, and it doesn't require brands to prove their products work. Nulastin’s products are sold as cosmetics, so the main check on its claims comes from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which requires brands to provide evidence to support their marketing claims. Dr. Belluzzo says Nulastin’s research goes further, meeting “that higher level of standard that the science could be defended at the FDA.”
That research is also how Nulastin plans to stand out in the hair loss space, a crowded category that has been flooded with supplements, prescriptions, and big-company money since the brand launched in 2016.
Unilever took a majority stake in Nutrafol in 2022; telehealth brands can prescribe treatment and products, and GLP-1 medications have created a wave of consumers anxious about shedding, along with what Garcia calls “predatory marketing” aimed at them. Nulastin has avoided targeting GLP-1 users, instead pitching elastin as a mechanism that sits alongside existing routines. “I don’t need to steal market share,” she said. “I want to be the first line of defense.”
All of that groundwork points toward the endgame Garcia had in mind from day one. “I started Nulastin with the goal to be acquired, not because I wanted to get in and out. I wasn’t flipping a house,” she said. Her reasoning comes down to reach. Garcia wants to get elastin in the hands of “everybody in the world who needs it,” and she knew early on that she couldn’t do that by herself. “Alone, I can go pretty fast. [But with a strategic partner] we can go further,” she said.
The plan has been to build the science, patents, and product foundations first, then find a strategic partner that can plug Nulastin into its portfolio and put it in front of more consumers than the brand can reach on its own. She sees two natural fits: a company already selling through dermatologists and estheticians, “like Olaplex,” or a pharmaceutical partner that could take her elastin technology beyond beauty.
Whether elastin becomes the next collagen will depend on what Nulastin clinical trials show and whether the brand can find the right partner to scale. But in a category crowded with heavily funded players chasing fast growth, Garcia is betting on a slower playbook, one built on proving the science first, keeping customers coming back, and owning the intellectual property before competitors catch on. “People search for years to find a mechanism of action that is unique to anything else that's ever been out there in the marketplace,” she said. “And right now, we've got that."