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backstory dye job Annie Humphreys learned about hair color the hard way. Annie Humphreys began apprenticing at Vidal Sassoon's original Bond Street salon in the 1950s, coloring a client's hair was not for sissies. "It was raw, very raw," says Sassoon's former International Color Director, who remembers bottles of ammonia being kept in the basement under lock and key. "We could have blown the place up." Products in those days were rudimentary at best, and blondes were tricky. In fact, the process was so laborious that only actresses and "ladies of the night" were willing to put up with it. To bleach the hair, Humphreys mixed two drops of ammonia with peroxide and added soap flakes to thicken it, applying the mixture to the roots with boiling hot water and a brush. Quite often she had to use a bit of citric acid to get the solution to stay put, and more often than not it would run. "You'd still have yellow roots and grey ends if you weren't careful," she says. Tinting was a whole other story. "You had to be quick because some of the products were progressive, and the color would get darker and darker the longer it was left on the hair. Tere were no buffers like we have now, so if you weren't fast, you'd have one color in the front and one in the back depending on where you started." By the early 1960s companies like L'Oréal and Clairol had come out with pastel toners that made life a whole lot easier. "L'Oréal had five colors, including Platinum Iris, Baby Blonde and Champagne," Humphreys remembers. "Clairol came out with Born Blonde in these beautiful chiffon shades. I believe a woman who used to work for Kenneth Battelle used Pink Chiffon on Marilyn Monroe." As it turns out, working under such abject conditions was a blessing in disguise. "It made me a better colorist," says Humphreys, "because you really had to work at it." 48 The Colorist | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2013 | thecoloristmag.com the main reason women colored their hair in the 1950s was to cover the grey. "Of course, they'd never admit to coloring their hair," she says, "and if you were doing anything but blonde or red, the color had to look like they were born with it." The downside for a terrifc colorist? "They'd never tell their friends if they found one." PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF HAIR HEROES BY MICHAEL GORDON When According to Humphreys,