Constable: Doctor in Arlington Heights invents products for multiracial hair
As a family practice physician in Arlington Heights, Dr. Ena Hennegan, 47, knows how to diagnose problems and look for solutions. So when she heard her husband of 19 years, Chris, lamenting the 70 half-empty bottles of various shampoos and conditioners piled around the bathroom the couple shares with their three daughters in their Cary home, the doctor prescribed her own solution.
"I wanted to design something for people like me and my daughters," says Hennegan, whose multiracial background inspired her to invent and launch her own hair-products line.
With an African-American father and a mother whose ancestors were white Europeans, Hennegan says her hair is thick, dry and curly. But the couple's daughters - Kira, 18, Naomi, 10, and Zoe, 4 - presented more challenges, with hair in colors ranging from black to red.
"Kira's hair is straighter than mine, wavy and thick and a little dry," says the mom. "Naomi's hair is thick and dry and curly just like mine. And Zoe's hair is curly and wavy, and it's not as dry."
That diversity made it difficult to find a shampoo or conditioner that worked for everyone.
"So we just accumulated more products, and when one didn't work we'd have this half-empty bottle," says Kira, who says she battled with her hair for years. As a little girl, her head was so itchy that teachers always suspected that she had lice.
A serious student who graduates from Cary-Grove High School on Saturday and plans to study medicine and become a surgeon, Kira says she was never a teenage girl who obsessed about whether her hair was lush or shiny.
"I just wanted something that makes me stop itching," she says, adding that her mother invented the solution for her.
"You can't shoot from the hip. That's not how we do it in medicine," says Hennegan, who works for the Northwest Community Healthcare Medical Group, which is affiliated with Northwest Community Hospital. So Hennegan called in some specialists and spent the next three years conducting experiments and refining the products.
"I have the great luck and fortune of knowing some world-class cosmetic chemists right here in the Chicago area," Hennegan says.
As founder and CEO of Three Daughters of the Doctor, the doctor-turned-entrepreneur worked with mSEED Group, a manufacturing and research lab in South Holland, to launch the Many Ethnicities brand, which bills itself as "the world's first premium hair care products for multiethnic people," and offers six products so far.
"It was a lot of weekends, early mornings and late nights," the doctor says. "I tested them extensively on my own hair and my children's hair."
The finished products at manyethnicities.com include natural and plant-based ingredients such as hydrolyzed pea protein, vitamin B-5, argan, avocado, moringa and sweet almond oils, jojoba and shea butter. The products, which range in price from a $20 jar of conditioner for kids to a $26 bottle of shampoo, are distributed by Planet Access Co. of Des Plaines, which is an enterprise of Search, Inc., a not-for-profit that employs adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
"I want to do something that helps people. This started with a passion for my daughters, and trying to ensure that they didn't have to go through the same frustration that so many multiethnic people deal with every day," Hennegan says. "But since I started this pursuit for something different, I've come to realize that my family's challenges aren't ours alone. This is a labor of love for my daughters and people like us."