typeF Blogs

By Shyema Azam

It was straight up rock and roll backstage at Helmut Lang. TIGI hairstyling pro, Paul Hanlon (who by the way, has THE most dreamy English accent ever), said the look was “a girl who was at a rock concert, who’s been headbanging, dancing all night, and her hair is really deconstructed, very greasy, very sweaty. She put all her hair back in a messy knot and went back home.”

And what rock concert is this cool girl just coming back from? Hanlon laughs a little before answering: “Metallica. Hair bands. She’s a metal band girl.”

To get the look, Hanlon and his team used TIGI’s Catwalk Session Series range. “It’s a morning show so the girls have clean hair which is the opposite of what we’re doing!” he said.

To prep the hair, they started with the Salt Spray (“It gives age to the hair, a few days old, very dry, weathered looking.”). Next up was Session Series styling cream which they applied section by section from the roots to end and combed it through with their fingers so it slicked back very tight off the head (“We don’t want volume, she’s quite a cool girl and we want it to be a bit more dangerous”).

After tying the hair in a super tight ponytail, they split the hair in half and tied them in two big knots, then pulled a few pieces out of the knot in the back of the head so there are irregularities with the length (he said he wanted it to look very organically messy). After pinning the “hair knots” in place, he finally used TIGI Catwalk shine spray to give it that extra gloss and to make it look very shiny and very “wet looking.”

“It looks very cool girl, very easy, very Helmut Lang,” Hanlon said.

In the makeup department, Lisa Butler led the TEMPTU team to keep the focus on the brow using their new AIRpod Brow in Blonde. I got to talk to Cory Bishop, one of TEMPTU PRO makeup artists, about the look (who by the way, is my new favorite person because he said he loved my pink shirt that day). He said the shade, used on all the models, is more of an ashy blonde. They applied it on the models starting from the brow, taking it all the way down to the lash line to cover the entire lid. So the brows don’t get completely lost, he said they used stencils first to give the brows a “crisp line.”

“The rest of the skin is clean, we used a little champagne highlighter [Sunset Glow] to give it that wet, hydrated look,” Bishop said. They finished off with their new Core Lipstick in VIP (which launches in May of next year) to create a “nude yet hydrated look.”

Bishop stressed that the look isn’t a concept look: “It’s very obtainable…any girl can do this and it’ll look really good.” What do you think?

Photos by Shyema Azam. Thumbnail shot provided by Temptu.