I recently read an article in Fashion Quarterly called ‘Hair and Now – Stylist advice on how to achieve flattering, modern hair”.  The first line of it said “Don’t let your hair date you”, something I thought sounded like good advice, until I read the second part, “Choose an age-appropriate look with these stylist tips.”

Oh dear.

The article did have some good advice, most of which came from the female stylist and were about the structural changes in your hair at certain ages….but in other parts was seriously lacking and conservative for todays women, who are more into expressing themselves. In your 20’s, it says, its time to experiment, your hair is a blank canvas. Yes! Very true. I read on. In your 30’s “Stop having asymmetric haircuts, shaving one side, having heavy undercuts and doing all those kooky things you did in your 20’s.”

Now, I turned 31 this year and my hair colour just this year has ranged from blonde to orange to pink and is currently a vibrant raspberry red.  So immediately, especially as a salon owner who specializes in bright and creative colour though “WHAT THE @*$%!”.

The well known hair stylist goes on to advise its time to have a more sophisticated hairstyle because many women are having babies and are putting the hard yards into their career goals. Well this seemed a bit of a generalisation to start with but putting that aside, none of this means that you can’t have fun hair!

I think the whole idea of  “age appropriate hair” is a load of rubbish. I also thought it ironic that one of the stylist featuring in this article about the subject has grey hair, full sleeves of tattoo and a big handle-bar moustache. Not the type of person to take a conservative attitude towards 30 year old womens hair! I DO believe in hair ‘aging’ you and making you look older, but that’s a whole different story, as is age appropriate dressing. But that face it that a lot of the time, if you get one of these cliche ‘age-appropriate’ haircuts, you end up LOOKING your age…and who the hell wants that?

As any of our clients know, we love colour, we love bright colour and we do it with class and sophistication. It doesn’t end up looking tacky or something out of a bad 80’s movie. It is wearable (although I hate that word as you can ‘wear’ anything even if it looks terrible!), its sophisticated enough to wear to work even if it does contain bright colour and we have clients of ALL ages wearing out creative colours. As for cuts, we have done some pretty awesome ones, a lot of them on over 30’s who have actually thought up the idea themselves! In the last few months I have put bright raspberry highlights with a darker red base into several over 40’s, I have done asymmetric cuts on serveral over 50’s and even put pink pieces through a 70 year old ladies hair who had beautiful naturally grey hair down to her waist.

I am a firm believer in getting the style YOU want to get, not what the current trends, your hair stylist or magazines and society says you should have.  Of course its good to stay current with your hairstyle but you have to get a colour and cut you love. Hair is a big part in the way feel about your appearance and YOU have to look at it everyday, not your hair stylist or magazine editor. As long as you stick to a style that suits your personality, skin tone and eye colour and your face shape then you can’t go wrong. Everyone has heard of freedom of speech, I say, how about freedom of hair!