Red, red hair… Ellen Burney is my colour muse. I may have the hunch, but she makes it real – she’s like a style endorsor for me. We have a colour relationship that has fluttered along with many a shade romance. We have happily been everything from a soft blonde to a bleachy mussed-up, and all the way through to a Gothy matt-brown. Most of our looks have been written up and documented for Elle and her blog http://vagabondiana.blogspot.com/.
Recently, we have been playing with tones of orange and red. We swoon over images from Lula magazine www.lulamag.com/, where she is now contributing editor, and from a zillion fashion images – but mostly of Karen Elson.
So for me, living as I do in a half hair world (advising stylists what trends they should embrace) and half fashion beauty world, deciding on which shade of red hair colour is a bit like choosing a red lipstick. There are so many tones! There are so many methods!
My final choice for Ellen is a blend of colours: a permanent colour with a vegetable glaze. After the permanent (I’m happily floating through Wella Professional’s Koleston range), I mix up a vegetable tone – Ellen and I are using different tone on tones over the top when she feels like changing hues. I’m leaving her with a bag of vegetable colours so she can just be who she feels…
Maybe these are broken colour rules but it’s working for us. After all, doesn’t a woman have many different personalities? I am sure she has many a different red inside her, too!
Anyway, if I were at a salon I would be making up a red fashion board right now! Using beautiful images of redheads! Ellen NEVER gets it wrong!
