Shakira, whose hips famously don’t lie, is now making sure her hair tells the truth, too. The global pop icon has officially entered the beauty arms race with Isima, a hair care brand born not from a whiteboard pitch session but out of genuine personal frustration. Tired of mixing her own DIY cocktails in hotel bathrooms and backstages around the world, Shakira decided it was time to formulate something more permanent—and less experimental. “I looked for a group of experts and scientists,” she said, “that knew how to do this.” Which, if you’re Shakira, probably means tasking a lab with decoding what humidity does in Barranquilla and Bel Air.

While this might sound like just another celebrity hair launch, the timing and execution say otherwise. Isima is dropping into a market already simmering from the heat of Beyoncé’s Cécred, which made headlines earlier this year with a first-ever exclusive partnership with Ulta Beauty. It also follows Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, which recently ascended into unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation after being acquired by E.l.f. Beauty—a gentle reminder that moisturizer and market caps are more intertwined than ever.

Shakira’s entry feels like a natural progression of the celebrity-beauty industrial complex. But it’s also a savvy bet on a highly specific, highly underrepresented niche: textured, mixed, and “unclassifiable” hair types. While Isima’s full product range is still under wraps, early teasers suggest it’s aimed at a cross-cultural consumer base that, like Shakira’s own aesthetic, lives somewhere between global pop royalty and curly-haired chaos.

This isn’t her first foray into entrepreneurship—she’s launched fragrances before and co-founded a school in Colombia. But Isima might be her most commercial and personal crossover yet. And in a world where hair care has become a surprisingly competitive proxy for influence (and influence a proxy for equity stakes), the question now is: will Isima be the next Cécred, or just another footnote in the era of celebrity-backed bottles?