Judging & selection

Who sits on the jury

Evaluation is conducted by an international panel of beauty industry professionals, including senior figures from hair, beauty and wellness. The panel scores each shortlisted nomination independently against the published criteria; scores are then aggregated and audited before winners are confirmed.

How the aggregation and audit process works

Each shortlisted nomination is reviewed independently by multiple jury members, who score it against the six criteria without seeing or being influenced by other jurors' scores. Those individual scores are then aggregated into a single evaluation per nomination, and the aggregated results go through an internal audit step before any winner is confirmed — a check built specifically to catch inconsistency (a nomination scored unusually differently by different jurors, which would flag it for a closer second look) rather than to override the jury's collective judgement. Nothing about sponsorship, advertising relationships, gala ticket purchases, or any commercial relationship with the network enters this process at any point; the entire evaluation runs on the submitted written evidence, scored against the published criteria, by jury members whose only input is professional judgement.

Why merit-based judging, and not a public vote

Public-vote awards are common in the beauty industry, and it's worth being explicit about why this programme deliberately doesn't run one. A public vote measures reach and mobilisation — which business or brand can get the most people to click a link — rather than quality. A large chain with a bigger marketing list and a bigger social following will reliably out-vote a smaller, higher-quality independent studio in any open voting system, regardless of which business actually delivers a better service or product. That outcome has nothing to do with merit and everything to do with audience size, which is precisely the dynamic a jury-based, evidence-scored system is built to avoid: a single-location salon with genuinely excellent, well-documented service has exactly the same path to winning as a large chain, because the evaluation runs on the evidence submitted against fixed criteria rather than on how many people can be mobilised to click a vote button.

This also explains why nothing purchasable enters the decision. A programme that let advertising spend, sponsorship level, or gala-ticket purchases influence outcomes would functionally be selling recognition rather than judging it — which defeats the entire purpose of a credential meant to signal independently assessed quality. Keeping those factors entirely outside the evaluation process is what makes the resulting title meaningful as a piece of evidence, rather than simply another form of paid promotion.