Key Takeaways:
When David Thurston left the brand he founded in 2021, Pulp Riot, he felt a hollowness that comes from reaching the top only to find it an empty, lonely peak.
“I put my foot out for what's next, and I couldn't find anything,” he said.
Thurston was not catalyzed to start his current venture, Danger Jones, until 10 people from Pulp Riot’s founding marketing team were unceremoniously let go from the then L’Oréal-owned brand (bought in 2018 for $150 million). To Thurston and his wife and co-founder, Alexis, this was their moment to return to their roots as entrepreneurs and build a brand that, in Thurston’s words, “wasn’t a rocketship, but a cathedral. Built to last.” In the spring of 2023, Thurston debuted Danger Jones, an artist-centered professional hair color brand.
Danger Jones now offers a full suite of products, including semi-permanent, gloss, lighteners, vivid colors, and toners, and its newest expansion is its most ambitious yet. Launching in March through Cosmoprof distribution, the collection of 84 permanent color shades is called Epilogue.
The nearly three-year-old Danger Jones is available in 43 markets, and Thurston projects an 84% year-over-year growth in Cosmoprof 2026 sales with Epilogue, and $50 million in sales by next year. He and Alexis self-funded roughly 95% of the startup costs, he said, though employees receive equity. Overall, the global professional hair color market was around $13 billion in 2024, according to Future Market Report, with permanent coloring accounting for about 48% of the market.
To reach its ambitious target and correct what Thurston sees as a detriment to professional colorists, Danger Jones is centering artists in its advertising, physical experiences, and overall branding. This is in response to a trend he says has emerged: conglomerate-owned professional color brands like Wella Professionals, Redken, and L’Oréal Professionnel are more interested in appealing to end users than to their professional customers.
“From our viewpoint, the giant conglomerates don’t care as much about the professional artists. They have their eyes a lot more focused on the end consumer than ever before,” said Thurston. “We are now a serious global alternative to corporate color, and I think that stylists want that. [They] want a relationship with a brand, and to support a brand that's supporting them back.”
From a formulation standpoint, the Epilogue permanent color line aims to simplify a process that has become increasingly complex over time. Often, colorists must mix multiple colors and add toners to achieve a desired shade, which Thurston described as more of a compensation or correction to the dye process than a creative choice. Two common hair dye ingredients, resorcinol and p-Phenylenediamine (PPD), have also been removed, as they are common skin allergens. But Danger Jones also added a bonding agent to the dye to provide longer-lasting, healthier color. Developing the line took nine months, which Thurston said is faster than the usual 12 months it takes a conglomerate brand to develop a single SKU.
Throughout its product development process, the Danger Jones team asks professional colorists to join them in Italy, where manufacturing and formulation take place.
“We didn't want to create a Pulp Riot 2.0—that would have been easy and boring. We wanted to create something totally different,” said Alexis Thurston.
For Epilogue’s debut, the Danger Jones team chose its four global stylist ambassadors, Kylee Akina, Tia Lambourn, Emily Chen, and Chrissy Danielle, to serve as the face of its marketing and branding. Danger Jones drew inspiration from 1980s and 1990s supermodel group photography and rented a home in the Hollywood Hills and a vintage sports car as backdrops for the campaign. Additionally, there will be three cocktail-style events for professional colorists in Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Chicago (hosted during America’s Beauty Show expo) between March and April.
As part of its existing professional community efforts, Danger Jones hosts Dangerfest, an annual retreat for 150 invitees. Alexis Thurston said that Dangerfest is not an off-site training event, but a more “enriching” experience for colorists. The team will also fly a group of 8-10 stylists and colorists every other month to the Los Angeles studio to help produce social content, network, and even share a group dinner at the Thurstons’ home (sometimes with a magician as entertainment). Thurston said that being founder-led is a unique advantage over conglomerates because it can foster more intimacy between the company and the professional community.
At the end of 2025, Danger Jones began offering a gamified rewards program for professionals, tied to a certification program called Danger Society. When stylists and colorists receive certification, they are automatically enrolled in the rewards program, where they level up through social engagement, IRL events, and other activities. The higher one scores, the more perks and access they receive, such as quarterly Zoom calls with David and Alexis, or invitations to Dangerfest. There are currently over 2,500 people in the program.
But the ambitions for Danger Jones don’t end at hair dye and professional community building. In many ways, the Thurstons have structured Danger Jones as a creative studio that also sells hair dye, evoking Milk Studios, which later created Milk Makeup. To that end, Danger Jones will release three unbranded feature-length documentaries in 2026 through its own studio on cultural pillars and places integral to artistic communities. The first, premiering at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in February, is about the Sunset Marquis hotel, a frequent haunt of rock stars. After showing in Santa Barbara and at the DOC NYC Film Festival, a theatrical release is intended in select US cities before going to a streaming service.
“Having already built a company, scaled it, and exited it gives us a lot of freedom to really do what excites us,” said David Thurston. “We've always thought of ourselves as not a hair color brand, but more of a creative brand where anything is possible.”