He Took Hair Care Back to Nature

Horst Rechelbacher, dressed in his trademark black cotton jacket and pants, sat in a sunny area recently at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills having breakfast--oatmeal with blueberries and fresh squeezed orange juice. For a man intent on replanting the barren plateaus of the Himalayas, he is not out of place in the fancy hotel.

Indeed, Rechelbacher has come a long way--from hairdresser’s apprentice in his native Austria to founder of Aveda hair and beauty products, by way of Minneapolis.

Today he is a multimillionaire (Estee Lauder purchased Aveda for $300 million two years ago), a status that frees him to wear many hats--consultant, environmentalist, author and film producer.

For the moment, his priorities: First, he still works with Aveda as a consultant and the line is about to launch a moisturizer that uses the mineral tourmaline.

And he is trying to start a new empire, this one based on food--Intelligent Nutrients, which so far sells nutrient bars in Aveda salons and stores. “I saw Paul [Newman] on Oprah,” he said. He was inspired by the actor’s discussion of the Newman’s Own food line, which funds children’s charities.

So Rechelbacher, an avid environmentalist, wants to use the profits from Intelligent Nutrients to replant Tibet. “The Himalayas are dying,” he said. “I have a lot of work to do.”

He has just finished writing a beauty book, “Aveda Rituals” (Henry Holt, $22). Unlike beauty books that give tips and instructions, this one focuses on daily rituals that incorporate the Hindu philosophy of ayurveda and other holistic healing methods. He understands the need to be beautiful, saying that even indigenous tribes in South America have elaborate grooming rituals. Tribe members told him they paint themselves “to attract the good spirits of nature.”

He also has produced a short film with Native American activist Robbie Romero, “Hidden Medicine,” which will appear on the Sundance Channel in January, having already shown at the Sundance Film Festival.

At a youthful-looking 58, Rechelbacher fondly reminisces about how he became, at 14, a hairdresser’s apprentice in Austria. “I didn’t think I was smart enough to go to college,” he said. In fact, he was dyslexic, years before anyone had a name for the learning disorder.

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But he was blessed with a photographic memory and a love of hair. As an apprentice, he washed the hair of many an Austrian contessa. As a result, Rechelbacher said, “I knew how to behave around demanding women, arrogant women.”

By 17, he was in Rome working as an assistant for Filippo, a high-profile hairdresser. Soon he was washing the heads of Europe’s toniest women, rubbing olive oil into the hair of Brigitte Bardot. Rechelbacher soon became a jet-setter, going back and forth to the States, working for a staggering $500 a day putting on shows for hair-care manufacturers.

In 1963, he was in Minneapolis for a show, had dinner with friends and on his way home was rear-ended by a drunk driver. He was in the hospital for three months with broken vertebrae and a number of other injuries, and was left $10,000 in debt.

The local hairdressing community rallied, visiting him in the hospital and setting up work for him after his release. His reputation was made after cutting one woman’s hair for the annual Mount Sinai Ball.

It only took three months at the city’s top salon for Rechelbacher to find his angel, a loyal customer and banker who co-signed a loan for $4,000 to start his own salon.

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Minneapolis might seem like an odd place for the jet-setting European to have settled down, but Rechelbacher had married a local woman and they quickly had two children, Peter (who would become president of his dad’s company) and Nicole (a fashion model and dabbler in the arts like her dad). So he stayed, got an apartment in New York City and commuted back and forth. The ‘60s, he said, were good to him. (He has been divorced more than 20 years. His partner of the last 13 years, Kiran Stordalen, was Aveda’s creative director.)

Two factors led to the creation of Aveda in Minneapolis in 1978. First, his mother, Maria, an herbalist, would visit from Austria every year. One day, she walked into his salon and said, “I don’t like the way your shop smells. You’re going to get sick.” Together, they began to work on an herbal beauty line.

Second, in an attempt to change what had become a wild life of wine, women and drugs, he went to India to study meditation and ayurvedic medicine. Like his mother, the monks taught him to harvest herbs at dawn before the sun opened the flowers.

They also sent him back to Minneapolis with a few herbal practitioners who are still with the company and help with product development.

His first product for Aveda (which he says means “knowledge of nature” in Hindi) was clove shampoo. The products, which now number more than 700, have been imitated by everyone from Clairol’s Herbal Essences to Estee Lauder’s own Origins line.

And Rechelbacher is pleased with Estee Lauder’s purchase of his firm. In fact, he said, he’d like to talk more about it, but he and Stordalen were heading to Santa Barbara to join an environmental symposium for the day.

Barbara Thomas can be reached by e-mail at barbara.thomas@latimes.com.