How K18 made its Tumblehair activation, a giant ball of actual human hair

No, the larger-than-life gigantic hairball rolling through the streets of New York City wasn’t AI.

In a stunt that looked like it could be straight out of Boots Riley’s surrealist comedy I Love Boosters, the hair-care brand K18 rolled a 150-pound ball of real hair through NYC. But the ball of hair, called the Tumblehair, wasn’t a literal manifestation of Keke Palmer’s anxieties and existentialism; rather, it was a way to illustrate the realities of hair loss—and embody all the hair that New Yorkers could potentially retain if they use K18’s newest product.

The activation is part of the brand’s launch of its FutureIQ Biomimetic Hair Longevity Serum, a product that claims to help prevent hair loss. As for the ball itself, it marks the brand’s first effort at such an out-of-this-world activation, which Kleona Mack, CMO of K18 at Unilever Prestige, said was inspired by the product itself.

“We really wanted to do something that broke through and didn’t feel like more of the same, but we also just wanted to get the conversation started,” Mack told us. “I think that really pushed us to take this risk.”

Building a hairball

To create the Tumblehair, K18 joined forces with Uncommon, a creative agency based in New York, Mack said. Made up of 161 billion strands of real human hair, the hairball measures approximately 10 feet in diameter and required human handlers to push it down the street as it made its way through Midtown, the West Village, Chinatown, and Seaport neighborhoods.

Its final destination was in the Meatpacking District outside a Sephora retail location, where visitors could see product demos, get complimentary scalp analyses, and touch and take photos with the giant hairball.

Moving the Tumblehair through NYC was a feat in and of itself. “We tried lots of different mechanisms to get it to move and roll,” Mack said, “but ultimately needed human manpower to get it through the streets of New York City.”

The billions of hairs came from K18 partner salons. Mack said the company asked salons to save the remnants from haircuts that would have otherwise been discarded, which representatives later picked up in bags and collected into the resulting Tumblehair, which was sewn together. The variety of the types of hair was important too, she said, as various colors and textures were designed to be representative of the diversity of New York.

The Tumblehair’s massive size is not only eye-catching, but mathematically representative of a stat that Mack said was key: K18’s product claims to help its users save 19,000 hairs on a single person’s head, which, multiplied by NYC’s population of roughly 8.5 million people, comes out to a little more than 161 billion hairs.

Mack said the impact of seeing so many hairs IRL was aimed at destigmatizing the conversation around hair loss.

“People are experiencing, earlier and earlier in their lives, earlier than they expected, graying, hair loss, all of these things,” she said. “We knew that a traditional way of going in was not going to get the conversation started, so what we were thinking was we really need something visually captivating, but we also need to be culturally relevant.”

Grossed out? Good!

K18 didn’t come out and claim the hairball on its social accounts right away, Mack told us, instead letting the stunt draw curious onlookers and hoping that the people who experienced the activation or heard about it would stir conversation online.

If that conversation included any visceral feelings of disgust, that was perfectly welcome.

“We didn’t fear it. We expected it, because we had those reactions every time we presented it to partners and our internal teams,” she said. “Either people were disgusted or obsessed with it, and we wanted both, because whatever emotional reaction it gives you, you’re still going to talk about it.”

The stunt generated an estimated $150,000 in earned media value, according to creator marketing platform CreatorIQ, in addition to more than 1.1 million social media impressions and nearly 30,000 total engagements, A significant portion of that engagement came from posts by creators like What’s Poppin? with Davis! and Myles Toe, whose videos were paid collaborations with the brand. The Tumblehair is set to show up at future brand events, too, although Mack acknowledged that the ball might need “a shampoo every now and then…to keep her soft and fresh.”

The real deal

Tumblehair comes at a time when out-of-the-box activations seem to be on the rise; for example, Netflix recently placed a man inside a billboard in Los Angeles for three days to advertise its new movie The Last House. Overall, more than 40% of US ad buyers said they’d spend more on experiential and in-person marketing this year, according to an IAB study cited by Emarketer.

The real-life tangibility of K18’s activation also pushed up against the growing sense of distrust among online audiences, where anything a little bit weird is often presumed to be made with generative AI. Several viewers who came across video of the activation online expressed surprise at the fact that it wasn’t fake.

It’s a notable shift from some beauty brand marketing of years past. When Maybelline digitally added eyelashes and a giant mascara wand to the London Tube and double-decker buses to promote a new mascara in 2023, many digital viewers were fooled into thinking it was real. At the time, a brand representative explained to Metro that Maybelline intended to provoke customers into questioning reality.

K18 similarly wanted audiences to do a double-take—but surprising consumers today required the Tumblehair to be physical, Mack told us.

“For us, we wanted that ‘Wait, is this actually real?’ moment,” she said. “We don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver, so it was really important in this age of AI…for it to be real.”