It is, Ghd hair straighteners would have you believe, "a new religion for hair", which might lead some of us to query whether hair ever had a religion, but anyway, to get to the headquarters of ghd, fashionable supplier of GHD straightening irons to the great, the good and the merely unkept..

But ghd (which stands for "good hair day") is, its owners will tell you, no ordinary product. Not for them the flashy London HQ and suave MD you might expect. It's an English company with a Yorkshireman at the helm.

GHD Hair Straighteners an astonishing success story

and a company to which women around the world are very grateful. Put simply, it makes straightening irons - two slabs of ceramic which, when heated up and clamped round a length of hair, iron it into frizz-free, poker-straight submission.

Ghd straighteners, aficionados claim, score over the competition because they retain heat better, which means they slide through hair more smoothly.

They can tame frizz or give you soft, tumbling curls - but don't take my word for it because nothing on earth will ever give me soft, tumbling curls.

"Ghds give you the hair of an Atomic Kitten in one easy stroke," says a friend, referring to the style-setting pop group. "Everyone who buys other brands ends up forking out for the real thing." This would be music to the ears of Martin Penny, group managing director of the business.

It's seven years since a hairdresser friend of his showed him some straightening irons he'd been sent by a South Korean inventor and suggested he buy the rights.

"He said they'd done well in the States, so how about selling them in the UK? He wasn't the best businessman in the world and he didn't have any money himself. So I invested to help him, for philanthropic reasons." Penny put in (pound stg.) 15,000 ($32,000), persuaded another friend to match that, then they got a (pound stg.) 50,000 ($107,000) loan from the bank.

The manager later told Penny that when they put the request to the loans department, they said: "Hair tongs? You must be joking." Penny and partners all had an equal third share, "Which all the textbooks would tell you is a fatal error, but it seemed fairest. How do you value one person's idea against two other's money?"

The ghd offices are an unlikely hub

for such a glamorous end result. A collection of low-ceilinged rooms built around a warehouse, they're hushed and full of young, smiley people with pictures of Christmas parties on their desks and tropical beaches as their screensavers, with two balding men testing new products in a poky room. The only clue that there might be some money here is in the car park, full of Mercedes, Range Rovers and BMWs.

Penny, 55, grew up in Yeadon, near Leeds, where his parents both worked at the local mill. The youngest of three children, he put himself through a textile chemistry degree at Leeds University by doing odd teaching jobs before becoming what he calls an accidental entrepreneur: in 1981 he started up an environmental consultancy, OHS, and made a killing advising companies on how to get rid of asbestos safely.

"The business took off very quickly and made a profit every year for 26 years," he says. "I'm just interested in business.

I never set out to make money.

My plan was to get as big as another business based in Manchester, but within two or three years I'd outgrown them. It's the same with ghd - your goals move, so you have to find other goals."

Along the way he also found the time to meet his wife, on a tennis court. Engaged three weeks later, they have now been married for nearly 29 years; he thinks this stability has been vital to his success. They bought their first house with a loan from his father, he started up his first business in the shed ("Well, the back porch really") and they lived off his wife's earnings as a nurse and his as a teacher.

He still works seven-to-seven during the week, and spends weekends catching up on emails. He says he sometimes wonders whether he'll ever retire, in spite of having first promised his wife he would do so at 40, and repromising every five years since, but he's worried he'd be bored. He takes about 100 business flights a year, many of them long-haul, and refuses to travel first class.

Business class is just fine,

he says, "because if you've been brought up in a very strict working-class environment, where you're taught to always eat what's on your plate, it's difficult to go to the other extreme". On the other hand, he is buying a house in Mauritius, and hired a jet last summer to take his wife and two grown-up sons on holiday to the south of France.

It's a moot point whether ghd created the trend for straightened hair or simply capitalised on it.
What's not in dispute is that it's a phenomenon born of a burgeoning industry. Not so long ago, people just washed and blow-dried their hair.

Then, in the early'90s, everything changed:

pharmacy and salon shelves began to fill up with masks, gels and anti-frizz solutions by every hairdresser you'd ever heard of and quite a few you hadn't. Where once we would read merely that Scarlett Johansson was wearing a Givenchy lipgloss or that Mischa Barton swore by Lancome mascara, now we know who's done their hair, what products they used and, crucially, how they got it so damn straight. And the answer, often as not, was with a ghd.

"Celebrity endorsement was always the plan," says Penny.

"My friend the hairdresser went out into the West End of London to try to get the product into the hands of celebrity hairstylists, people who do the hair of the likes of Kylie Minogue and Kate Moss. Stylists are like the gurus of middle England, so if they're recommending a product it gives it a lot of kudos."

And recommend it they did.

Scheduled revenues in year two of the ghd business plan in Britain were between (pound stg.) 3 million and (pound stg.) 4 million; they did (pound stg.) 12 million. The plan for the third year was (pound stg.) 5 million; the reality was (pound stg.) 37 million. "It went viral," says Penny. GHD video search

"It was a craze."

Good hair day had turned into good pay day. In 2005 Penny bought out his partners and they each walked into the Ilkley sunset (pound stg.) 15 million richer. Last year, ghd clocked up (pound stg.) 120 million ($250 million) in sales worldwide, and made (pound stg.) 26 million profit - "And we're in only 15 countries at the moment.

L'Oreal is in 172." In Australia, sales of ghd straighteners have enjoyed a 50 per cent growth rate, year on year, since their launch here in 2004.

What all this is doing to the world's hair is another matter.

There's little doubt that straightening irons can damage the ends of the hair, causing split ends - but so can any form of heat styling. Ceramic straighteners, however, may cause less damage because they can be heated to a much higher temperature, thereby producing the desired effect more quickly.

The suddenness and scale of ghd's success

is all the more astonishing when you realise they're only sold in salons, and that early growth was all word-of-mouth - they didn't do any advertising for the first two years.And Penny, though a talented businessman, had no experience building a brand. "But I read a lot of books and talked to a lot of people. I've got my feminine side as well," he adds, deadpan.

Selling through salons, he reckons, meant professional endorsement for ghds and an air of exclusivity that they could build on in terms of creating an image. When ghd did eventually hire an agency to do some market research, the word that came back time and again was "belief" - girls just believed that ghd irons were the best.

It was but a short marketing step from that to their branding a "new religion for hair". "People said, 'Don't you think that's a bit dangerous?' Well, yeah, but not as much as you might think.

I get the odd letter saying hellfire and damnation will descend upon us ...

" He's also not fussed by a recent ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority in Britain, which was prompted by 23 complaints, that a ghd TV advertisement was "likely to cause serious offence to Christians".

"Our media agency calculated that 35 million people saw that ad at least once and we had 23 complaints," he says, "so I hardly think that constitutes widespread offence. I thought it was fairly innocuous."

But hellfire and damnation apart, isn't he worried that everyone who wants straightening irons has already got them? Or that the trend for straightened hair will wane? The short answer is no. Penny reckons ghds are like iPods - that everyone wants the newest and latest one - and besides, he says, you don't just use them to straighten hair: lots of women use them to style their hair instead of a hairdryer and brush.

And somewhere out there, lest we forget, there are women with hair like the three girls of Atomic Kitten, who - do I sound bitter? - use them to curl, too. They have found a new religion. They believe.