She wore a raspberry ombre: Fun dyes are in
T H E A R I Z ONA R E P U B L I C
S U N D AY , J U N E 2 , 2 013
When Shelly Bodine’s 12-yearold daughter and her friend decided to use cherry Kool-Aid last fall to dye their hair fuchsia, Bodine gave the girls permission.
Bodine, 48, said she wanted to be the kind of cool mom who let her tween experiment. And in an effort to show just
cool she was, Bodine dyed her hair, too. The color would last about a week, her daughter told her.
Instead, Bodine sported an electric-raspberry hairstyle for almost eight months. She wore the look to work as the vice president of marketing for eInstruction, to school functions and to the grocery store.
“It’s, like, permanent,” said Bodine, who lives in Tempe.
With a 25-cent kitchen-table dye job, Bodine inadvertently inserted herself into a national trend. Hair colors that in previous decades were spotted only on teens and punk and rock musicians are now on the heads of stay-at-home moms and professional women, from 20-something to 50-something.
Dyes once found only at hip boutiques, record stores and head shops — to be applied in home bathrooms — are now mixed at full-service salons, for women who have the budget for highquality color. In the Valley, Rolf’s Salon & Spa is seeing the jump in “fashion hues,” as the industry labels them, and so are Dolce Salon & Spa and Madison Avenue Salon and Day Spa, among others.
Women are dying their hair for their own reasons — to mix up their look, to show they’re not too old to have fun, to look edgy, to look tough, to stand out.
“Punk is more of an attitude than a style,” said Guido Palau, a freelance hairdresser who contracts with Redken and L’Oreal, and who styled the head treatments for the exhibit “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan through Aug. 14.
“It was anti-establishment. It was aggressive, in-your-face. ... It eventually trickles down and becomes the norm.”
Some adults feel the urge to make a statement because American culture lacks a standard rite of passage into adulthood, said Chip Coffey, a licensed professional counselor and director of therapy services at St. Luke’s Behavioral Health in Phoenix. Some people get piercings. Others, tattoos.
A less permanent option, Coffey said, is hair color.
“There’s a part in our head that wants to be a rebel, but we want to be a safe rebel,” Coffey said. “There are enough people with purple and pink (hair), that it’s safe to do that.”
The root of the issue
Performers across all genres are tinting their hair to match everything from their eyes to their nail polish to their shoes.
The list of musicians with rainbow locks reads like a board Hot 100 chart: Nicki Minaj, Pink and Katy Perry. Today even mainstream actresses such as Charlize Theron, “Mad Men” star January Jones and Alison Sweeney, a mainstay on the NBC soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” have added colorful highlights.
“It’s getting more and more acceptable,” said Tish Bellomo, co-founder of the New York company Manic Panic, the dominant brand in the alternativecolor market. “It’s on the runways. It’s with all the designers.”
In the month after English actress Helen Mirren colored her pale hair pink for February’s BAFTA awards, the
reported sales of pink hair dye skyrocketed by 243 percent. Blue and purple tints also saw substantial bumps in sales.
“We’re so happy that the world has finally caught up,” said Manic Panic co-founder Snooky Bellomo, who, like her sister, is in her mid-50s. “It’s like a color renaissance.”
What cool colors
“One of the hottest trends in color is pastels,” said Sam Villa, Redken’s Florida-based educational artistic director. “It’s not so punky. It’s really soft, feminine and romantic.”
Violets, salmon pink and sky blues are trending shades, said Villa, whether done with permanent color, chalks, sprays or clipins. Far and away, Villa said, the purple tones are the most popular.
“It’s very mysterious and sexy at the same time. It gets people to take a second look.”
Jessie Donoho, a master stylist at Madison Avenue Salon and Day Spa in Chandler, said she is seeing more interest now in fashion colors than in the past.
Donoho, 24, recently wove purple into the hair of a police officer.
“It was very subtle. She loved it,” Donoho said, noting she was not surprised to see a public servant request such an unconventional color. “The majority of the clients who are doing crazy colors are over the age of 30. It’s huge. I have clients all over the board.”
Along the bottom edge of her long, chestnut hair, 32-year-old Amber Tellez of Mesa has a violet panel that she says makes her look a little edgy when she reports for work at the Wells Fargo Corporate Center. And, she said, it lets her prove to her 14-year-old daughter that she isn’t “too old” to try a fun color.
“It felt good,” Tellez said. “I just wanted something different. I don’t want my hair to look like everyone else’s.”
Just a fad?
One person in the salon industry believes fashion colors are just a fad seeing fringe gains.
Cyrus Bulsara, president of Professional Consultants and Resources, said fashion colors make up about only 1 percent of the overall hair-color market.
One reason is that fashion colors are particularly high-maintenance. They’re a commitment, said the pink-haired Reagan Jones, executive director at Dolce. Faded color, she said, can look incomplete or disheveled.
“As long as the woman is ‘put together,’ it becomes part of a full package,” Jones said. “I think that tolerance in all capacities is more accepted in 2013, and I think ‘fun color’ is a part of that.”
Palau, who styled mannequins in the Metropolitan exhibit, said hair was a centerpiece of the punk movement.
Palau grew up in the English punk scene, when such celebrities as designer Vivienne Westwood and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols established the movement’s anarchist aesthetic.
“What’s so amazing is its longevity,” he said. “Now, you can see anyone with colored hair and it’s acceptable.”
Bodine can attest to that. After gathering her nerves, she was able to walk into a work presentation and be taken seriously, raspberry hair and all. No one said a word.
And now that the color has grown out, she said she’d do it again.
“Some people respect people who do something a little bit different,” she said. “I really had fun with it.”