One of the most influential colourists in the UK currently is Tom Smith. He’s impressive for working in a salon and repping several leading brands, which gives him a fabulous overview. His clientele give insight into why the consumer wants, the brands inform on where we are with innovation. Add to this Tom’s personal passion for exploring trends and seeking out signs of upcoming vogue, and you have a 360º vision of colour upcoming.
Clever colour services
We asked Tom – who is based at Billi Currie in Marylebone Village, central London, what he sees as important to growing your colour business? He tells us that encouraging clients to come into the salon more often means exciting them about the colour they have and the colour they could have. Read that again – it’s obvious and genius at the same time!
Tom explained that colour techniques are falling into a stripped-back minimal realm, with clean neutral shades and global colours leading the way. With his trend-setting intuition, and as the evo international creative colour director, Tom knows what he’s talking about. He counsels taht dimension is kept to an absolute minimum on deeper hair with super-finely woven textural colour, playing into the ‘clean girl’ and ‘health and wealth signalling’ macro trends.
Tom’s words
“Blondes are glowy and golden as they become inspired by the vibrancy and popularity we had for the copper, red and violet shades earlier in the year and often shadowed as consumers return to wanting a more ‘lived in’ shadow to their hair and therefore softer grow-outs.
“Scandi blonde hairlines are reducing and replaced with more subtle, natural alternatives and the most exciting of all is Crystal Clear which utilises a highlift tint to lift the remaining dark on hair that has a high percentage of white, while subtly toning the white. This means those who want to celebrate and design around their grey hair can be brighter than the blondes!”
Over to you: clever colour
So what can you do to excite your clients about their colour? Here’s some advice from Tom.
1 One of the best things about the surge in liquid acid demi formulations (such as evo hue verse demi) is that there is zero base break. This means a very simple and effective opportunity to shade the tone direction of your client after their usual blonding appointment, without shifting their natural base or giving them super high commitments.
Psst! When combined with a custom-coloured maintenance conditioner such as evo fab pro, this gives clients the playful opportunity to ‘test out’ various shades without the commitment of totally changing their hair plan.
2 In addition to this, the placement of lightness around the hairline is something we are all paying much more attention to. Using colour to contour, brighten or thicken the appearance of different areas of the client’s hairline is a next level way of creating a bespoke design. Tom says, “When zone toning, I’ve been adding depth to the finer hairs of the recession area to thicken this area, giving the illusion of lowering a high forehead, and brightening around the lower temples to create a lift at the top of the cheekbone.“
3 Clients love the idea of playing with placement to balance and contour their face shapes and you can vary this depending on how the client intends on wearing their parting and style, even giving them convertible or asymmetric options for those more daring.
So now you know! No excuse, get to it… and enjoy!
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