Highbrow Hippie Blog

After a morning of rain, the sun came out right as we finished Natalie’s color today. Bright golden balayage for the girl with the sunniest, sweetest disposition. For years, Natalie tried to have long hair and couldn’t get it to grow past a certain point. She was told the only way was to keep cutting her dead ends and one day it would be healthy enough. She even resorted to extensions. Then one day we said enough is enough, really focused on healthy color application with no overlap, and won’t you know, a few years later she may as well be Rapunzel;)

Sometimes you get a client whose beauty is so bright from the inside out, you can’t choose just one picture! Thank you for visiting the atelier and trusting us with your gorgeous hair Dr. Aruby. At the end of a long day, your energy is exactly what we all needed. Also, your style is goals.  Since relocating to LA, Dr. Aruby’s natural grey and curly hair had unfortunately been subjected to harsh heat styling that left it sensitive, breaking and...

My dear client of over 15 years McKenna recently shared this photo with me of her grandmother reading outside at our atelier while she waited for her, and it filled me with more joy than I can describe. 

Earlier this year Lauren and I started a journey with her hair color, with the main goals being to make her hair strong and healthy again, and eventually incorporate her natural hair color into her highlights and transition her out of a very brassy base color. Lauren was open to being patient from the get go, and now 3 appointments later, she is a bright, sunny, and most importantly, healthy hand painted blonde. No base color, no toners. The best part? I asked her to stretch her appointments as long as possible (about 12 weeks), and before this last appointment 14 weeks had gone by before she realized she needed hair color. As much as I love seeing her, that was when I knew her color was finally in a great place. 

I was contacted recently by the Hollywood Reporter, who asked some fellow colorists and I about our thoughts on the recent chatter regarding 46 year old Alexandra Grant and her glorious hair. Of course, I had to ramble about a few other things that were bothering me about this topic. I recently had a new client disclose that the reason she booked an appointment with me was that she knew she would be safe and be seen in my chair, because she saw other women her age reflected on our Instagram page. It was feedback that made me exhale, because, as a colorist who is also a woman of color, I know what it feels like to feel invisible and erased. I also recently read a New York Times interview with Katie Couric on ageism that stated the alarming statistic that only 15 percent of all images in media are of people over the age of 50. That number gets smaller when we focus on only women. And it gets downright abysmal when we focus on women of color.