Gingers
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Why Are There Suddenly So Many Redheads?
Zendaya, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber—they’ve all lately dyed their hair shades of Lucille-Ball copper. How to make the notoriously hard-to-maintain hue work for you.
Ms. Jenner’s jolted locks were among the references that Katie Castro, 27, sent her hairstylist when she went red earlier this month. Two dismal pandemic years had wearied Ms. Castro, an L.A. merchandising assistant and natural brunette. “I needed something to refresh my life. And since I can’t retire and move to Paris, I just dyed my hair red.” She sat in the chair for six hours, getting her shoulder-length hair lightened before the colorist applied auburn dye gloss. “My idea was this would change my life,” she said. As yet, she concedes, “it hasn’t.” But after getting gaggles of compliments, she’s still optimistic: “I just wanted to feel special.”
Red dye can often deliver on that front, according to Kim Santantonio, an L.A.-based motion-picture hairstylist: “It makes you sparkle.” Ms. Santantonio, who outfitted Nicole Kidman in red wigs when she played Ball in 2021’s “Being the Ricardos,” said she froze on learning that she’d have to recreate Ball’s iconic ball of fire. But after testing scads of different shades against Ms. Kidman’s complexion, she was confident she’d nailed it. “It might not have been the exact red that Lucille Ball had…but it was very close. We wanted it to look perfect on Nicole.”
Finding that optimal shade—dazzling, not clownish—requires an acute understanding of skin tone. If you have a warm complexion, said Ms. Douglas, consider violet pigments or coppers and reds that have more depth. If your skin is especially fair, go for a toasty copper. Ms. Perry said it’s taken her years to master the color match—and it’s not even the toughest part of setting a client on a fiery path. “I always start the consultation with, ‘This is very high maintenance and there’s a lot of at-home upkeep,” including the need to use a color-depositing shampoo. Whether you opt for permanent dye (for extreme transformations) or a gloss (applied over hair to give existing color a reddish tint), she advises coming in for touch-ups every six to eight weeks.
That copper is a pain in the scalp to manage hasn’t deterred fans. Patricia Lea, 78, is a natural redhead but has been a red dye-hard since she began going gray in her 50s. The color warms her face. Grayish-white hair, said Ms. Lea, who lives in Boulder, Colo., makes her “look very pale and washed out and [I] feel half dead.” She considered embracing gray after retiring from her job as a landscape designer—until her husband “decided to run away from home and have a different life at 70,” she said. “I thought, forget this. Atom bomb, new world,” one she wanted to go into as a redhead. She’d always been perceived as an energetic person, she said, and her red hair bolstered that. Her daughter, Emily Lea, 33, a filmmaker in Bozeman, Mont., has brownish hair with hints of copper, but recently tinted it redder ahead of her summer wedding. “I feel confident and more me,” she said.
Authentic red hair is rare—only between 1% and 2% of the population comes to the shade naturally. That’s why Ms. Santantonio finds Ball’s hue so intriguing. “It set her apart from everyone else because it’s unusual,” she said. “It completed that big personality of hers.” The younger Ms. Lea said potential redheads would be wise to factor in that conspicuousness, cautioning the shy: “If you want to blend in, do not dye your hair red.”
Anyone with an opinion, feel free to circle back, okay?
