Kook: The Ocean-Safe Skincare Brand Built by a Master Scuba Diver

Every ocean lover knows the feeling that arrives in the shower after a long day in the sea. It's not the post-surf blues, or the pining to be back in the water. It's the texture, after six hours of salt, sun and wind have set into our hair and skin. Quickly, our vibe goes from sun-kissed beach babe to haggard ocean gremlin, with hair that feels like rope, a face with the texture of a vintage handbag, and skin crystallised with salt. After hours of brushing it out and soaking it in deep condit

Every ocean lover knows the feeling that arrives in the shower after a long day in the sea.

It's not the post-surf blues, or the pining to be back in the water. It's the texture, after six hours of salt, sun and wind have set into our hair and skin.

Quickly, our vibe goes from sun-kissed beach babe to haggard ocean gremlin, with hair that feels like rope, a face with the texture of a vintage handbag, and skin crystallised with salt.

After hours of brushing it out and soaking it in deep conditioner, we feel recovered, and determined to avoid the whole thing next time. Unfortunately, if you're a true ocean lover, most of the solutions that work for us don't work for the water we've just climbed out of.

The go-to fixes are obvious enough. Leave-in conditioners, hair masks, deep moisturisers. But those off-the-shelf, chemical-packed products are wreaking havoc on the very reefs and marine life we jumped in to see.

In protected marine reserves like Hanauma Bay, you're told you can't get in the water with any product on you at all. Not sunscreen, not conditioner, nothing. Because almost nothing in a normal bathroom cabinet was designed on the assumption it would end up on a reef.

So we're left with two options. Look wrecked, or risk damaging the thing we came to look at.

Or that was the choice, until Kook came along.

Founded by Christina Kuklinski, a master scuba diver who spent two years living on boats before she made a single product, the Los Angeles brand makes ocean-safe hair and skincare for people who spend their lives in the water and would rather not poison it on the way in.

Alt: Kook Pre-Swim Hair Mask and Solar Moisturizer photographed on wet sand

What is Kook?

Kook is an ocean-safe hair and skincare brand for ocean athletes and lovers. Think: swimmers, surfers and divers who are sick of having to choose between looking after their hair and skin and looking after the water.

Everything Kook makes is formulated so that whatever rinses off you in the sea won't hurt what's living in it, and the range is deliberately small. Just two products, both developed and tested properly before either went on sale.

The hero is the Pre-Swim Hair Mask, a wax-based treatment you put on before you get in rather than after you get out. The second is a mineral sunscreen built to be worn as a daily moisturiser, protecting you from salt and sun while keeping the reef clear of the chemicals found in most conventional formulas.

How does Kook work?

The hero product solves a problem most people outside the water don't know exists.

Divers and swimmers who want to protect their hair generally reach for a leave-in conditioner, which has two flaws. It's usually formulated for a pool rather than the sea, so it contains things you shouldn't be releasing over a reef, and it washes straight out anyway because it was never built for six hours of immersion.

Kook's Pre-Swim Hair Mask is wax-based instead. Carnauba wax forms a physical coat around each strand, locking moisture in and holding salt, sun, surf and chlorine out for the length of a dive. It's a different mechanism to the rest of the aisle, and it's the reason the product exists.

The Solar Moisturizer takes the same approach to a different complaint. Mineral sunscreens have a reputation for sitting on the skin like paint, so Kook built the SPF into a moisturising base with vitamin E, green tea extract, squalane and meadowfoam seed oil, using non-nano zinc oxide for the protection. It's water-resistant, but the point is that you'd wear it on a day you never went near the sea.

Both products went through an unusual amount of testing before launch. Kuklinski sent the mask to more than a hundred ocean athletes around the world and asked them to report back.

That's how the formula changed. The wax content was high enough that in cooler climates the mask set hard in the pot, and testers were scraping it out and warming it in their hands before they could get in the water. Which rather defeats the point of a pre-swim product. Kuklinski reformulated so it stays workable in the cold, a finding that would never have surfaced without testers thousands of miles from California.

Meet the founder: Christina Kuklinski

Kuklinski, known by most people who love her as Kooks, learned to dive at seventeen with her dad as a school senior project. The hobby stuck harder than either of them expected.

As is the case for many of us, the career that followed had nothing obviously to do with it. She spent years in New York doing experiential marketing for Unilever brands, TRESemmé, Axe and Dove Men+Care among them, then moved to Deloitte Digital. Nowhere near the water.

Burnt out, she left the corporate world and spent two years travelling. Most of it was underwater.

She lived on boats, dived all day and took any chance she could find to get back in the sea. Her hair and skin took a beating for it, with strands breaking off in the shower and skin that moisturiser wouldn't fix.

When the money ran low she headed back to New York and landed at American Express, overseeing the beauty portfolio and reading cardmember spend data across the whole category to work out what people were buying and why.

And the wiggly life path started coming together. In one hand, a consumer problem she understood from hours in the sea and sun. In the other, years of reading the haircare and beauty industries through market data.

She started building Kook alongside the day job, moved to Los Angeles a year later, and launched the first product six months after that.

Why we love Kook

"Green", "non-toxic" and "eco-friendly" are not regulated terms. Anyone can print them on a bottle, which means the category rewards whoever writes the best copy rather than whoever does the work.

Kook certified before it had a name worth protecting. B Corp, reef-safe, vegan and cruelty-free, plus 5% of revenue to SeaTrees for mangrove restoration in Mexico. Doing it in that order costs margin at the point a young brand can least afford it, and it means there is nothing to walk back later.

What we keep coming back to, though, isn't the certifications. It's the hundred testers.

Sending unfinished product to strangers on the other side of the world, and then changing the formula because of what they said, is a slower and less flattering way to launch than most founders will tolerate. It produced an unglamorous fix no amount of California testing would have found, and it built an audience who were invested before there was anything to buy.

We'll be watching.

We sat down with Christina to learn more about Kook and how she turned two years of living on boats into a hair and skincare brand the reef can survive. You can listen to the full conversation on The Discovery Call podcast on Spotify or YouTube below.

🎧 Listen to the episode here

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0KMzTQJwtDVO4bz2KZC3I8?si=5va56M2BSfKMXWUHkirlVg