My hair... before. (with the wonderful Adam Troldahl)
For years now, I’ve had long, curly dirty-blond hair. Last Thursday, all that came to an end. (DUM DUM DUM.) I cut my hair short and dyed it brown.
The finished product... a new me!
Correction: Larsson & Lange cut my hair. Big time. It was a cultural experience.
Larsson & Lange is a really swanky salon that from what I understand is really well-known in Sweden for being into hair art and hair fashion. Besides doing the normal stuff—you know, cutting, dying, perming, etc.—they have hair fashion shows and educational sessions for other hair stylists throughout the area. Here is an example of one of the fashion shows they took part in:
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| Tylosand Hair Show, 2010 |
Pretty sweet, right? You can see a whole slideshow of the show here. Because all the text is in Swedish, I can’t really tell whether all the hairstyles were done by Larsson & Lange or just some of them.
- Larsson & Lange’s fall 2009 aesthetic
I got my hair cut at the Östertull location in Malmö, which is an absolutely beautiful salon. It’s really close to the train station, which was convenient for me since I was coming in from Lund. Larsson & Lange uses Redken and Pureology products primarily, but the Östertull salon is also a Shu Uemura salon, so they use Shu Uemura products as well. (I had never heard of Shu Uemura before… shows you how much I know about this stuff.)
Larsson & Lange started in Malmö in 1991, and since then they’ve expanded to eight locations throughout Skåne, the southernmost region of Sweden where I live. They are now in Malmö, Helsingborg, Halmstad, Lund, and Ängelholm. In 2008, they won a Global Salon Business Award on the basis of their originality, risk-taking, team philosophy, and customer service, among other things.
So how did I get a free haircut from this ridiculously awesome salon?
Hair modeling, baby. My friend Cecile and I were walking along this giant street after a successful day of exploring Malmö and were talking about how we both wanted hair cuts but we also didn’t want to spend a lot of money or have our hair really messed up. AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT, we passed a salon ON THAT VERY STREET that was advertising for hair models! Woohooo!!! So we went in and talked to a guy and got only slightly intimidated by his extreme trendiness and then we debated going to the “hair audition” for the next two weeks and then we psyched ourselves up to do it and then we got put on the list to be (DUM DUM DUM) hair models.
To be honest, it sounds a lot fancier than it is. Real hair models do lots of fancy things, I’m pretty sure, but I didn’t have to do a show or get very dressed up or be an extraordinarily thin or good-looking person, which is good, because I’m not. All I had to do was show up on time, dressed in black, and be willing to let them do whatever they wanted to my hair. They told me ahead of time that they would be cutting a substantial amount off and that they would definitely be dying it. The only request I made was that I asked them not to dye it purple or green or something like that, and I think that because they could tell that I’m not a cutting-edge fashion sort of person at all they agreed. Plus I told them that I had never dyed my hair before, and they almost fell over with shock.
After the initial meeting, I started getting really nervous and kept thinking about how much I loved my long hair, but fortunately I had enough time to get over my butterflies and get excited for the big day. By the time I got there, I was just like, “Go for it!”
The coolest part about this hair modeling thing (besides the finished product) was that the stylists were totally engaged with my hair. There were two of them there, and each one of them had a model to work on. Together, they looked at my face structure and compared it to a couple of fashion spreads they had chosen as their inspiration. They asked me how it behaved at different lengths and looked at the shape of my neck. They held color cards with sample dyes against my skin to see how it would look on me. Then they would collaborate with each other throughout the process, checking to see what the other one thought as the new hair style took shape. I have never seen such an intensive creative process for a haircut, but it was obvious that because they would be showing their work to other stylists later, they wanted it to be the best possible hair cut to represent their aesthetic vision and skills.
The kind of funny thing about hair modeling was that the sort of luxury elements about getting your haircut (the scalp massage, the soothing music, the stylist asking you what you want) went right out the window. Which is cool, but it was definitely different than what I’m used to. The stylists were playing rap music and chatting with each other. I loved my hair cut and told the stylist so… she was glad and all, but she didn’t really care. It’s all good! But it was a pretty funny experience.
All in all, I had a great time. Cutting and dying my hair took 2.5 hours from start to finish, then I had to have it styled, and then I waited around for the rest of the hair models to have their hair done and for the show to start. Larsson & Lange was having some sort of in-service training session for all their stylists, so the two women who had done all of our hair called us up on stage in groups to show the other stylists what they had done and talk about how they had done it. It was really intimidating to be sitting up on stage looking out at these sea of super-fashionable Swedes… so many shades of hipster. After the presentation was done, they all swarmed the stage with their iPhones out to take pictures, and millions of them touched my hair and my head. Fortunately, I like being petted. Cecile was also there, and she compared it to being petted like a cat. Not bad!
The Östertull Salon (Larsson & Lange/Shu Uemura)
Here are some pictures of the Östertull salon that I went to. I found these photos at “Below The Clouds,” one of Sweden’s biggest blogs about architecture and design.
- Clients get their hair cut and dyed behind the barrier of white poles. Clients still waiting peer through the poles and evaluate their options with help from an enormous selection of magazines.
- Doors to the bathrooms, staff lounge, shampooing room, and educational center are all hidden in the walls of this hallway.
I’m going to write more about Shu Uemura, because apparently he’s amazing and this blog post is already 2000 times too long. HAIR! HAIR! OMG, HAIR!!!
My neck and I are getting reacquainted.
One of our super-trendy hairstylists behind me (Magdalena) and me… just a little excited about the hair.
Mary Svensson, the top stylist who cut my hair! Thanks for making me look so great!
The coolest thing, I think, was that I ended up with a really great haircut that I would have never asked for or imagined for myself. By letting someone else take control, I ended up with something a lot more exciting than what I had before, even though I liked that, too. Adventures are good! And in the end, it’s just hair.
