Women are Dyeing to go Red
Sales of home hair dye kits are up 20 per cent, and women still visit salons. The recession is going to our heads
All over Britain, women are getting into the red. It was a strong beauty trend last year and looks set to continue through 2009, with all shades of rouge in evidence, both on and off the catwalk. Even the hottest starlet on the planet has succumbed: Scarlett Johansson recently lived up to her name and had her trademark blonde tresses dyed a sultry shade of vermilion, appearing at an event to promote champagne with a flame-coloured Veronica Lake peekaboo fringe — although, confusingly, she is also a blonde in the new Dolce & Gabbana make-up campaign. And Christina Hendricks, aka Mad Men’s Joan Holloway, has set pulses racing with her red locks, which she has dyed since the age of 10.
In a way, though, that’s the point. Red may be the celebrity tint du jour, but hair colour in general is all the rage. Nothing lifts a woman’s spirits more than a trip to the hairdresser, and nothing is more transforming or rejuvenating than a change of colour. Feeling dreary? Go red. Unsexy? Try blonde. Want to be taken more seriously? Try brunette. It even seems to be catching on among the more traditionally dye-shy male population: Macca was recently snapped with a suspiciously luxuriant shade of reddish hair, and rumours abound about the mighty Bono.
It’s a simple psychology: the world may be collapsing around your ears, you may feel overwhelmed and out of control, but one thing you do have a bit of say over is the hair on your head. It’s a small but effective act of self-assertion: focus on what you can change rather than on what you cannot. Crucially, at a time of economic constraint, it’s quite a cheap way of updating your look.
This phenomenon — the follicular equivalent of the well-documented “lipstick effect” — is borne out by figures from L’Oréal, which show that sales of the company’s hair-colour lines have increased by 7 per cent since December last year.
Figures from the consumer analyst Mintel back this up: supermarket sales of home hair dye kits have risen sharply, with Tesco reporting a 200 per cent leap for its 99p permanent hair-colour line in November, and overall hair dye sales up 20 per cent in a year.
And it’s not just home dye kits that are selling well. According to another consumer analysis company, TNS Worldpanel, women are visiting salons less frequently than they did before the recession but, when they do go, are more likely to treat themselves to a colour as a substitute for a more costly luxury such as a holiday or a new handbag.
“Women maybe feel that they can’t afford to spend as much on fashion, so having their hair dyed is the next best thing,” says Amie Wilson, technical director at the Daniel Hersheson salon in London, who has been colouring hair for 27 years. “It gives you an instant lift and can make you feel younger and prettier without any surgical procedure.”
Alexandra Richmond, a senior research analyst at Mintel, agrees. “A lot of women are returning to something much closer to their natural colour so they don’t have the expense of touching up their roots,” she says. “Brown shades are popular because they are easy to look after and there is a perception that brunettes are taken more seriously in the workplace — which is an issue at the moment. You don’t get brunette bimbos, do you?”
Whatever your colour choice, it would have been hard to achieve until a few years ago. Modern dyes are faster, safer and more reliable than ever. Once you get the hang of it, changing the colour of your hair is hardly more taxing than changing your nail polish.
Nothing even approximating to modern hair dye existed before the late 19th century. In 1883, a company in Paris patented a variation of a textile dye for use on human hair, but there were problems. As Caroline Cox, a hair historian and lecturer at the London College of Fashion, explains in her book Good Hair Days (Quartet, £11.99), these dyes (compounds of para-phenylene diamine or para-toluylene) could be unpredictable and, at times, toxic. “Early experiments on a dog turned its blood black and it expired shortly afterwards,” she writes.
It was in 1907 that the first real breakthrough came. Using mineral salts, a clever young French chemist called Eugène Schueller created “Auréale” and marketed it as the world’s first safe hair dye (two years later he changed the name to L’Oréal).
Even so, disasters still happened, often because of allergies. “In 1931,” writes Cox, “the author of The Art and Craft of Ladies’ Hairdressing felt compelled to describe the allergic reactions to look for in clients undergoing treatments in the salon: ‘First of all there appear small pimples or pustules, and these are accompanied by intolerable itchings, followed by a kind of eczema; the skin is violet red, inflamed, damp and oozing; there are swellings underneath the eye and eyelids . . . frequently the entire face is swollen. The forehead is often burnt and blistered . . . and sometimes the complete interior of the mouth is swollen, ulceration supervening. Violent headaches and shivering are also felt, and in chronic cases the legs and feet become swollen’. ” In Britain, such incidents led to the 1933 Pharmacy and Poison Act, which made warnings on packets and a patch test in salons legal requirements.
Despite the horror stories, women still reached for the bottle. In the 1930s the craze for platinum blonde hair, as popularised by the film star Jean Harlow, led to a worldwide obsession with bleaching. According to Cox, “by 1932 sales of peroxide had zoomed, up 35 per cent in America alone”. The peroxided hair was then rinsed with methylene blue to take out the yellow, creating the desired white effect. This very artificial look epitomised femininity for a while, but then came the backlash. The term “bottle blonde” became associated with women of “easy virtue” and when Harlow died of renal failure at the age of 26, unfounded rumours that her early demise had been caused by her hair dye helped to revive the charms of the brunette. Yet by the 1950s the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly had put an end to all that, consolidating the image of the carefree blonde as inherently sexier than her dark-haired sisters.
Modern hair colour is not just safe, it’s also much less of a blunt instrument. Celebrities and film stars still drive overall trends, but most women want colour that works with the natural shade and texture of their hair.
“The right colour is the one that brings out a woman’s eyes and skin tone,” says Christophe Robin, creative colourist director for L’Oréal Paris. “The aim is not to transform yourself but to embellish your natural beauty.” Thus red hair can bring out blue eyes beautifully, and a warm chestnut will do wonders for brown eyes. Older skins look better against softer shades — blacks and dark reds can be harsh on more mature faces.
As for techniques, the buzzword is “multitonal” — subtle, versatile, almost translucent tints, custom-blended for each client. With home-colour kits now highly sophisticated, salons have to offer extra expertise to maintain the upper hand. “You can make colour as subtle as you like,” says Wilson. “You can even formulate it to fade out, which is popular at the moment because it means that people can go for longer between appointments.
“The fashion for chunky, stripy highlights is long gone, thank God. We still use foils, especially on thicker, longer hair, but on fine hair we do something called valiage, a French technique. We apply colour freehand, two or three strands at a time, to give a subtle effect. Often I use two similar tones so that the hair looks natural and sun-kissed.”
Paul Bingham, head colourist at the London salon Lockonego (and himself a proud redhead), recently demonstrated the effects of multitonal colouring on my own, very fine, hair. In the past I have steered away from covering my grey, as flat overall colour has only made it look limper and finer than it already is. What Ben did, working painstakingly in subtle tints, just a few hairs at a time, was to create the illusion of thicker, healthier hair, blending the grey rather than covering it completely — to remarkably successful effect. The result was something that I could never have achieved at home by myself.
The colourist Sibi Bolan, who is responsible for many famous heads including that of the television presenter Alexa Chung, approves. “Colour is so much more graceful than it used to be,” she says. “With the credit crunch, people are looking for a subtle colour that will last well and give them good value for money. Put it this way: it’s like the difference between wearing a lipstick and a lipgloss. It’s still colour but you wouldn’t necessarily know it.”
All our yesterdyes
Since the dawn of civilisation, women (and men) have sought to alter their hair colour, for aesthetic and cultural reasons — with mixed results. In Ancient Rome, blonde hair was at first the mark of a prostitute (Aphrodite, goddess of love, was a blonde) but later came to be considered the greatest prize of all — a classical illustration of the perennial truth that we all want what we can’t have, Mediterranean women being generally dark-haired.
At the height of Roman extravagance, wealthier citizens created the illusion of blonde tresses by powdering their hair with gold dust. The less well-off used potash water, yellow flowers and a variety of other substances: the usual result was a yellowish-red colour and sporadic hair loss. Luckily, there was another solution: hair was shorn from fair-haired slaves captured in Gaul and Northern Europe, and made into wigs.
Red was also popular, being rather easier to achieve through a variety of preparations (tallow and ashes, berries, crushed nutshells, vinegar) or henna.
In all, historians have discovered more than 100 formulas for hair dye in the ancient world, including a solution to the problem of greying hair devised by the Ancient Greeks, who used a paste of lead oxide and calcium hydroxide, or lime, to darken hair with lead sulphide crystals — the ancestor of Grecian 2000?
In 16th-century Venice, a fashionable coppery-red was achieved by putting caustic soda on the hair, then sitting in the sun. In Britain, the flame-haired Elizabeth I sparked a colour craze, resulting in English noblewomen dousing their scalps in saffron and sulphur power, the side-effects of which were nausea, headaches and nosebleeds. Long before that, the Saxons had used woad to turn their hair blue.
Colour Expert Really good fun — great for a rock-chick look. Has two colours in it, so you can experiment. The shades are quite subtle, so it’s not a disaster if you mess up. The red is particularly good. Also leaves the hair well conditioned.