By Ella, founder of Puurella
My job is skin and hair — not showerheads. I never set out to build a brand.
My name is Ella. I'm 34, a mom of two, and I've been a dermatology nurse in Houston for ten years. My job is skin and hair — not showerheads.
The women who came back every six weeks
My clinic kept seeing the same stories. Adult eczema that wouldn't let go. Skin going ashy two hours after the cream. Dryness no body butter could hold.
We'd give the cortisone. The emollient. The same advice. It would settle for two weeks, then come right back.
For a long time, I told myself that's just how it is. We make it work. Something in me knew that line had become a comfortable lie.
The Sunday I cried in the bathroom
When we moved to Houston, my hair started breaking off in handfuls in the shower. I doubled up on my deep conditioners. I ordered the $40 masks I'd never let myself buy before.
Nothing held.
One Sunday night, I looked down at how much hair I'd just lost in the sink. My edges — the ones my grandmother had been so proud of — weren't holding anymore. When I leaned toward the mirror, I saw my crown thinning in a spot I didn't want to look at.
I sat on the floor and cried.
What no one had ever told us
I hadn't changed anything — except the city.
A $9 test strip under the showerhead. It went red. Houston: some of the hardest tap water in the country.
The dermatologist I work with explained what nursing school never taught me. Chlorine and chloramines oxidize the disulfide bonds in type 3B–4C hair. Heavy metals like lead and copper weaken the strand.
Calcium and magnesium leave a film no leave-in can break through. And melanin-rich skin loses moisture faster when chlorine hits the lipid barrier.
One chemistry equation. And no one had ever told us.
So I built what no one had built for us
I tested the water in fifty zip codes across the South, where most of us live. Same pattern, every time.
I called a chemist who knew our hair. My dermatologist. A water-filtration engineer. With their help, I built what the industry
had refused to build. Puurella is a filtered showerhead engineered around the
actual chemistry of textured hair and melanin-rich skin. Three minutes to install, no tools. Take it with you
when you move.
It was never us. It was the water.
—
Ella, Puurella's founder