If hair is truly “the richest ornament of women,” as revolutionary monk Martin Luther once said, then this spring and summer, expect the ladies to look positively festooned.
With those spring showers, tulips won’t be the only things in bloom as women start planting pretty things in their tresses too. It seems hair accessories are suddenly in season again, says L’Oreal hair guru Eric Del Monaco, a beauty expert on Project Runway Canada.
“There’s some beautiful stuff,” Del Monaco says. “Really nice jewel pieces, ceramic pieces. It’s all about creating your own fantasy.”
Del Monaco is also the official hair artist for Toronto Fashion Week and started using accessories in October for the spring 2009 collections. His favourites are the chic feather accents he’s seen, worn flat and sleek against the scalp.
But for those who can’t wrap their heads around all the beads and plumage, spring and summer hair is still full of fun and fantasy, Del Monaco says, with manes going big, curly and cascading.
“That hair straightener is going out the window,” Del Monaco says. “For the daytime, it’s just big, huge, loose curls that can be made anyway… sort of ’60s, big, flippy hair.”
As for those sticky summer evenings, keep the curls intact but slick them back with a dollop of gel, Del Monaco says. Nighttime looks are more elegant and constructed, similar to Kate Winslet’s glam ’do from this year’s Oscars.
“Leave the house in the morning with some big curls and at night, before leaving the office, you can just put in some gel, put it up in a bun and off you go,” Del Monaco explains. “For hot summer nights that look’s really hot, especially if you have a hot tan.”
As for colour, Del Monaco says the shade this season is brunette, with lots of “tortoise-shell” and “cinnamon-kissed” browns.
But for Melissa Baca, owner of Toronto salon Madfactory, she says many of her clients are swinging to the other hair extreme and requesting the Agyness Deyn: cropped, catwalk-edgy and white blond.
“It’s a short, choppy kind of bob… croppy in the back and longish to the front,” Baca explains. “A lot of blond and more of that sort of peroxide-y blond.”
But amusingly, most of Baca’s clients are fantasizing about a different celebrity’s hairdo this spring — a little lady whose hair accessories are probably more of the plastic and glitter variety.
“It’s kind of funny but we’ve had a lot of clients ask for Suri Cruise’s hair (daughter of actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes),” laughs Baca. “We hear she’s got a good stylist.”
