I have new hair. Please excuse the fact that I’ve taken these photos with my shower in the background – I was filming a video within the bathroom and the light was nice!
But anyway, here’s my new style – shorter, blonder, fresher, younger. I really like it. Many thanks to the team in the wonderful Josh Wood Atelier – Melanie Smith for that colour and Katherine De Rozario for that cut. So many people have asked for more details on what Melanie and Kat did, here we go:
For the colour, Melanie used a “classic herringbone foil application”. Apparently a lot of hair colourists don’t do this anymore, favouring balayage, but Melanie feels that “blondes need foil”. (I certainly think it’s because of the colour a really sharp and fresh look.) She states that she then “balayaged all the ends car front to give a full-on blonde effect with no heavy root regrowth.”
For the cut, Kat “razored your hair into an A-line one length long bob. Then using scissors I sliced into the shapes to break up the weight and provide that lovely broken-up beachy feel. I finished by twisting the hair as I dried to give a nice natural finish with a bit of minimal tonging in the very end.”
If you like the style and wish to copy it, then that’s your blueprint. Obviously, you could go to Melanie and Kat themselves…and one of you might just have that opportunity soon. That’s all I’m saying for the time being – watch this space!
This only agreed to be the hair-perk-up I needed because I’ve been losing a substantial amount of it recently – it happened after I had Angelica too. I didn’t wish to keep tying it back, since i have two little thinning hair at my temples, but I was getting hot and irritable with it down. I didn’t go to my appointment thinking I’d go much shorter, therefore it was on a bit of a whim!
Doing items to my hair “on a whim” is still something of a novelty. It's taken me quite a few years being accustomed to the fact that I am now in sole charge of what happens to my hair, because for many of my full time modelling years (let’s say from 2002-2012), my hair colour and cut was more often than not dictated by the jobs which i did.
When it came to paid hair jobs, frequently they would want to clart around with my barnet – make their mark. My agency, Models 1, were always excellent at laying down the law with clients about my hair – any changes that individuals wanted to make had to be agreed prior to the job, and were often written in to the contract. If it was a small hair job, the client would only be allowed to trim my hair and edit the roots – if it would be a big advertising job then quite often they had permission to do more drastic things.
But the issue with any job where they were allowed to do stuff to my hair was this: one person’s concept of a trim, as we all know if we have ever been in a hairdresser’s chair ever, is completely different to the next person’s idea of a trim. The number of times I came from a “quick trim” having been virtually buzz-cut wasn’t even funny, there was one particular TV commercial where a “shoulder length” cut turned into a jaw length bob.
But hey – I was being paid! That’s what should happen to be running through my mind, shouldn’t it? But locks are a very personal thing – it’s a huge part of our identity. It has a massive role to play within our overall appearance. And so it always felt quite weird, especially at the outset of my modelling career, to have to relinquish control over my hair and let people discuss over the top of my head what may be done with the scissors or the bleach bottle. I’d always get a horrible, squirmy feeling in my stomach when i heard phrases such as “graphic layers” or “boyish crop” or “choppy ends”. I’d want to shout, “it’s MY bloody hair!”
In all fairness, most clients were very keen to make sure that I was happy with what they desired to do – I don’t wish to give the impression that my head was completely hijacked. But every intentions were often lost in translation, and people did tend to be quite scissor happy in the fashion industry! In the end, it had been all so stressful which i just learnt to detach myself from my hair completely – I thought of it as a sort of removable wig, part of my wardrobe. If someone botched my colour (bright, custard yellow highlights, New York, 2011) then I tried to comfort myself using the knowledge that it could be corrected. If my long, shiny locks were chopped right into a dodgy mullet (Amsterdam, stoned hairdresser, 2002) i quickly had a bit of a cry and, on the next job with a decent stylist, I’d have it re-cut and corrected.
Needless to say my hair spent a lot of time getting blonder and shorter. Actually, six months before my wedding, I ended up with hair so short it had been shaved at the nape of my neck. It was so white blonde that just two days after a bleach touch-up, my scalp would look as though it was covered in thousands of tiny black fleas or nits in which the roots were peeking through. Looked great, actually and that i had thought that it was quite exciting at the time, but you get the idea: my hair was never my own.
Hair jobs were a useful source of income and so I used to suffer unhealthy cuts and colour jobs, but boy was I glad when I no longer needed to say yes to them! My last ever hair job as a full-time model was possibly the absolute pinnacle in terms of ridiculous, soul-destroying hair situations; they cut five inches in the length, hacked some layers in, dyed it a weird, brassy shade of blonde and then on the shoot day decided they preferred me in a wig. Yes, readers: on top of my new, horrendous style, I wore a wig.
You couldn’t recover it.
Anyway, I didn’t set out to possess a moan about my modelling days – I'd a fabulous time, what a way to spend your twenties! – but I do now rejoice in the fact that I have full control over my hair. After i go shorter, it’s because I want to. When I go blonder, or darker, it’s not because someone has botched my colour, or since it will look better in a picture, it’s because I fancy a change. Now and then I do take on the hair job, like the traditional days, but I tend to have more of a say. It’s all my own hair, little thinning hair and all.
Now: I’d like your hair anecdotes within the comments section, please: disasters, emergencies, disagreements that ended with fisticuffs at dawn… Tell me all. Any bad hair modelling stories, models out there? If you make me laugh enough, I’ll go into my office and dig out some of the worst pictures from my modelling past. Maybe I’ll place them into a video slideshow. How very 2004!
