Meet the Founder

There is a version of the beauty industry that runs on instinct alone - a trained eye, a steady hand, a good guess. Prashuna Reddy was never satisfied with that version.

She trained as a pharmacist first. Before she ever picked up a colour brush professionally, she understood formulation - how an active behaves on skin, how pH determines what a product can and cannot do, why two clients with the same request can need two entirely different treatments. That training didn't stay in a classroom. It became the lens she has run her career through ever since: diagnose first, then execute.

That lens found its proving ground at L'Oréal India, where she spent eight years in technical and education roles - not on the salon floor as a stylist, but behind it, training the stylists themselves. She taught colourists across the country how to read hair the way a chemist reads a formula: condition, porosity, prior chemical history, before a single decision on tone. That discipline earned her Best Educator — India, an award presented in Moscow, and Best Colourist — South India! recognitions given for teaching a standard, not just performing one. A seat at the L'Oréal Colour Trophy in London followed.

Hair colour remains where her expertise is sharpest. Grey blending. Dimensional colour. Correction work — the category where a wrong prior treatment has to be read, understood, and undone before anything new can be built. It is technical work disguised as artistic work, and it's the discipline she is most recognised for.

She has never treated her education as finished. Alongside her pharmacy background and L'Oréal training, she holds certifications in makeup artistry and in advanced nail extenions from Bluesky — and more recently completed an executive programme in business growth at IIM Bangalore (NSRCEL), delivered under the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative. Few professionals in Indian beauty hold competence across this many disciplines — chemistry, colour, nails, makeup, and now business strategy — which is precisely why she is sought out for a perspective that spans the industry rather than a single corner of it.

In 2021, she founded The Nail Hue on a conviction sharpened by everything before it: beauty services in India don't need reinventing. The operating standards behind them do. Every service now runs to a documented protocol. Every client interaction begins with consultation, not assumption. Every result is owed to the system — not to which technician happened to be free that day. Two Bangalore salons operate on that standard today.

Her work now extends beyond the chair. She designs and delivers brand experiences for leading Indian jewellery houses — bringing salon-grade craft into live, high-touch moments for brand launches and campaigns. It is the same principle applied at a different scale: precision, translated into experience.

Within the industry, she is known simply as the Salon Chemist — the person the market turns to for the science behind the service, not just the service itself. It's a name she has built deliberately, and one she intends to be the benchmark for.