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backstory Did you know? Farouk Shami with his mentor, Sam Lapin a purpose-driven life One man's quest to develop ammonia-free hair color. Farouk Shami has had an extraordinary life, which he recalls in his new book, American By Choice. Beauty school had not been in his plans when he came to the U.S. in 1965, but his decision to become a hairdresser set him on a path that altered the course of his life. After learning that he was allergic to the chemicals in the hair color he used every day at the salon, he became obsessed with developing a method for coloring hair without ammonia. Poring over every chemistry book he could get his hands on, he finally found the solution in the natural world. After observing how sunlight scattered on a pond in primary and secondary colors, it became clear to him that sunlight was not one color but a mix of red, yellow, blue, green, purple and orange. It was, he recalls, his "eureka moment" and he began looking at hair color as a physicist, not a chemist. Perhaps light, he reasoned, held the secret to ammonia-free hair coloring. After much trial and error, Shami perfected his system, which he called SunGlitz. Te process involved painting primary colors onto strands of hair that had been pulled through a plastic bag, and it cut processing time in half. Shami demonstrated his revolutionary new product at a hair show in Dallas in 1986 and sold out of product by Monday morning. Te rest, as they say, is history. 48 The Colorist | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013 | thecoloristmag.com born in Beit Ur, a small village in Palestine, during World War II. 2 HE BECAME fascinated by color when, as a child, he helped his mother dye straw and silk threads for her weaving. 3 HE CAME TO THE U.S. on a scholarship and would have returned to his homeland to teach English had he not met a group of beauty school students and decided to enroll. 4 HE WORKED FOR Framesi as a guest hair artist in the early 1980s, which is how he met his mentor, legendary colorist Sam Lapin. 5 HE WAS A GOOD FRIEND of Paul Mitchell, who advised him to start his own color company. PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF FAROUK SHAMI 1 FAROUK SHAMI was