upfront
the artist's way
Marianne Dougherty
EDITOR IN CHIEF
mdougherty@creativeage.com
➜ My grandson
Evan and
his beautiful
mother on her
wedding day
8
The Colorist | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013
PHOTOGRAPHY: ROBIN HOUCK
A
week or so before my daughter Rachel's wedding this summer, we decided
that something had to be done about her hair color. Fortunately, John Simpson,
Lead Art Director and Global Artistic Master for Goldwell, lives in Pittsburgh, and
he agreed to do triage at Lewis Salon in Shadyside. His assessment? She was
stuck in the "blorange zone," a word he came up with to describe color that isn't
brown or blonde or even orange for that matter. "It's a familiar story for a lot of
blondes traveling from darker levels," he says. While there were bands of brassy
blonde on top, the back of Rachel's hair was dark, and I had no idea how he was
going to fix what was, quite frankly, a hot mess. Still, I sat there transfixed as he
got to work, mixing two or three different bowls of color and adding highlights (he
calls them accents), neutralizing a lot of the brassiness and lifting Rachel's base
color just beyond the target shade to get past the red-orange zone. "Tat way
everything deposits into a cool neutral," says Simpson, who teaches colorists to
conquer, not camouflage. "If you cover up your mistakes, they just come back."
Finally, he used a balayage technique to break up the solid wall of dark color in
back, then tied everything together by applying a glaze at the shampoo bowl.
Te results were breathtaking, but it was like watching David Copperfield perform
sleight of hand. How did he do that? I've been writing about color for years, but it
still seems like witchcraft to me, and I am in awe of anyone for whom color is an
art. You know who you are.