About Peter Louis

I spent twenty-three years behind a chair in Manhattan. This site is what I know from it.

How it started

The Peter Louis journey began in 1997, when I started working at the John Barrett salon in Bergdorf Goodman. I was suddenly immersed in the fashion industry, working on photo shoots and meeting celebrities.

I began beauty school at twenty-nine. At the top salons the wait for a spot on the cutting floor is five years, so the ordinary path had me cutting hair at thirty-four, against people who got there at twenty-four with a decade of hands behind them. That is not a reason to hurry. It is a reason to learn differently.

So I did not wait to be taught. I went where the knowledge was and left when it stopped. One salon ran weekly art lessons, drawing portraits from a live model, because the point was to teach stylists to see rather than copy a technique. They said it would take three years before you really saw. They were right.

My own room

When I had the opportunity I opened my own room at 1209 Second Avenue in September 1999, and later a larger salon at 143 East 57th Street. I named it Peter Louis after me, Peter, and my little brother Louis. God rest his soul.

They were different businesses, and it matters for what I know. Second Avenue was blowouts and cuts — my work, day in and day out, from nine in the morning until ten at night. Whatever I know about drying hair, the sectioning, the direction of the air, what a brush does and does not do, was learned in that room, several heads a day, for years.

Fifty-seventh Street became something else.

Top salons specialise. Colourists colour, cutters cut, and although a few people do both they are mostly separate disciplines. I ran it that way — I had colourists and I had cutters.

Our PR person got us onto NY1 and Good Day New York talking about Japanese straightening, and NY1 ran the segment every hour across two weekends. The phones rang for years. Later I trained stylists in Great Lengths hair extensions and we got busy with that as well. Some days we did eleven Japanese straightenings, some days eight, and I watched the same heads come back every few months and saw exactly which products held up.

I closed 57th Street in 2015 to focus on e-commerce, and worked at my back-up salon, Peace & Love, until 2022.

The reason the room moved that way is not mysterious. At the time a blowout was forty or fifty dollars, a Japanese straightening six hundred and up, extensions fifteen hundred and up. One extensions client occupied the chair time of roughly thirty blowouts.

So the two halves of this site come from two different rooms. The blowout and brush pages are Second Avenue, where I did the volume. The pages about what chemical processing does to hair are 57th Street.

The service we would not offer

There is one thing I want on this page, because it is the clearest answer to why anything here should be trusted.

During those years the keratin straightening treatments were everywhere — cheaper than Japanese straightening, faster, and in enormous demand. We did not offer them.

The reason is formaldehyde. Those treatments released it when the flat iron went through the hair, and the exposure fell hardest on the people standing in the room all day breathing it — my staff. It was not a close call, and the money did not make it one.

I mention it because this site earns commission on some of what it recommends, and the only meaningful evidence that a recommendation is honest is a record of turning down money that was not.

Why I went to the factories

The bottle never tells you enough.

I toured René Furterer's production facilities in France and watched glass essential-oil ampoules sealed shut with fire — filled, then the neck melted closed, so no air ever reaches the oil. That single detail explains more about why that product smells alive than anything printed on the box.

I paid my own way to Paris to understand Phyto properly, toured their salon, met the owner, and was taken out to Burgundy to see a salon using their colour. Nobody sent me and nobody was selling me anything.

I met Philip B. when he was handing out samples in a back room at John Barrett, and later worked alongside him at Mark Garrison, where he ran a treatment room with herbs hanging from the ceiling.

The brushes

In 2017 we developed and branded a line of sustainable hair brushes, and Bombshell Brush was born. It is known for brushes that are light, durable and well made.

They came out of the chair rather than a desk. A supplier would bring me a sample, I would use it on clients and tell him what was still wrong, and he would come back the next year with something better. That went on for years, while I was doing blowouts from nine in the morning until ten at night. Eventually he brought me one I approved of.

You can see the whole range at bombshellbrush.com.

Since then

In 2026 I published 14-Day Wellness Reset: The Brazilian Protocol. After I opened my salon I began travelling, and noticed I felt healthier and stronger in many of the countries I visited. My search for optimal health began there, and the book is where that went. It is available on Amazon, and there is more at peteragro.com.

How we work

Peter Louis was built on friendly, one-to-one customer service, and that is still the most important guiding principle here. We treat every customer the way we treat our own friends. So whether or not you decide to try the products, thank you for taking the time to read this and get to know us a little better. We look forward to being friends with you soon.

How this site makes money

Great Lengths is stock I buy and ship myself. When you buy it here, you are buying from me.

Bombshell is my own brand. I earn from those brushes as the seller.

Everything else — Kerastase, Phyto, René Furterer, Philip B., Lazartigue and the rest — I link to on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. If you buy through one of those links I may receive a commission, at no additional cost to you. That is what pays for the writing.

I recommend what I stocked, used and watched work. Where I have no first-hand experience of something, I leave it out rather than fill the gap.