If I had a penny for every time a new trainee or an experienced image consultant asked me to explain more about hair colour, I would have been able to pay off the entire world’s debts by now!
Hair, and particularly its different nuances of colour, is the biggest stumbling block in the image industry
simply because the training on hair colour analysis for image consultants has been, for the most part, out of date, pretty naff, or not available at all.
Our clients are obsessed with hair colour. It’s become a big issue for them, especially as more and more people are colouring their hair. They weren’t doing that back in the early 1980s. We could see their natural hair colour more easily. Now virtually everyone colours their hair!
Out of 13 attendees on my live professional Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis training course, only one didn’t colour her hair. And she had already coloured it previously.
Do you realise that 100% of your clients could potentially colour their hair?
How are you going to find out what she would look like with her natural colouring?
Is it even worth spending time finding out?
You’re so busy showing your clients the best colours for clothes, make-up, accessories, etc., how you can possibly ignore your client’s hair?
You can’t – because her hair is all around her face!
You simply have to know about hair colour or you’ll destroy your status as a colour expert
For the first 17 years of my career as a personal colour consultant, I pretended hair didn’t exist because I didn’t know how to analyse it, and I hadn’t a clue how to help my clients choose their best hair colour.
Occasionally, I had tried to give out the ubiquitous garbage that most image consultants are taught but I knew the same piece of advice could not possibly apply to all Springs, etc. So I merely recommended to all my clients, “You should speak to your hairdresser.” By gum! I must have sounded like a right plonker!
But that all changed when I received a huge proverbial slap from an expert in the world of hair, who told me:
“Image consultants are not professional hair colourists, and they should stop pretending to be”
For example, during your colour consultation, you might recommend that your client needs her hair ‘to be toned closer to her natural colouring’.
So what does the client do then if her professional hair stylist/colourist decides that course of action is simply not possible?
I didn’t just WANT to know how to deal with this, so that I could help ALL my clients with their hair colour. I NEEDed to know for my own piece of mind, and for my own integrity as a professional consultant.
So I stopped listening to all the rubbish being propounded by image consultants and trainers who couldn’t even be bothered to learn how to read a hair colour chart, and I started asking for help and advice from professionals and experts from the hair industry itself.
- I put everything I learned into my training course Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis
- We ran a one-day live training for 13 image consultants and videoed the whole thing, and now it’s available for you with lifetime access to the online version
- It’s the ONLY hair colour analysis training course for image consultants in the whole wide world!
The following is taken from video 1 and page 5 in the Course Notes:
How to introduce hair colour into a colour analysis
We, and our clients, may be dealing with hair professionals who know nothing about colour analysis.
One day when she was colouring my hair, I asked the Head of Hair at our local hair training college why they didn’t include basic colour analysis in their courses for hairdressers. It took her a moment before she sheepishly replied, “I really have no idea. We should do!” Hopefully, things might have changed since then…?
From my own research, the hair colourist is, in the main, very anti the world of image. It’s no flippin’ wonder, because so many image consultants give their clients advice that often clashes with the real situation that the hair colourist has to deal with.
- Would you know how to apply a colour to fine hair as opposed to coarser hair? You cannot give the same advice to both!
- We need to stop telling every Summer to put ash into their hair!
Every client is unique. Every human being is unique.
So let’s stop issuing daft generalisations about human beings. It’s nothing short of laziness.
Stuff the system. Put the client first!
Because of this type of rubbish advice, the trained hair professional says to (or about) the image consultant, “You don’t know what the heck you’re talking about.” Also the hair professional knows that if the client has already had a chemical process applied to her hair, this will naturally affect the process of colouring hair in the future.
Image consultants are not qualified to even comment on this. Only a trained hair professional should attempt this level of advice.
Beware! Because this is what could happen, and very often does!
- The image consultant says to Grunwalde, “Let’s put a warm, vivid red in your hair. Let’s pick one from this shade chart…”
- The colourist says, “I can’t do that, Grunwalde, because your existing base colour is cool… or you’ve had a perm… or you’ve had a bleaching… or your hair is not in good enough condition to make those changes…”
- And suddenly it’s not just the hair professional who thinks the image consultant who suggested this is a complete chump…
The hair colourist is trained to know how to get our client’s hair colour from where she is now to where she wants to be – and you need to take into account that it might not happen overnight. In fact, it might take some time. It certainly did for me!
- You can read my own story ‘From Dark to Blonde’ in Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis
- It took around 18 months from when Scott Cornwall and I first discussed the possibility of me going blonde
- I kept a diary during that time of the all the ins and outs as he personally took me from dark brunette to cool pearl blonde
The big question you have to ask yourself is:
What are YOU going to do right this minute, in this colour analysis situation, to help your client while she thinks about and/or goes through that transition?
Hair colour is THE biggest stumbling block for colour consultants
I strongly recommend we all stop using out-dated hair colour advice from those Eighties’ glossy books and training courses, where the authors simply made it up so that it matched their ‘system’.
I strongly recommend instead that we seriously consider learning from experts from the world of hair, which has greatly moved on in the ensuing 40 years and into the 21st century.
Method 1
If you can find a free-thinking hair colourist who is truly interested in helping their clients with the best colours for her, then you could work together on this. After all, you both have mutual clients, all of whom want to look and feel fabulous.
I have only ever found two of these gems, both male, and both of whom approached me first, purely because of my outspoken comments about how rubbish most image consultants were at helping their clients with hair colour – and that absolutely included me:
1) Scott Cornwall, an absolute genius when it comes to colour, hair, and personality. He is probably the world’s only Hair Image Expert and he wrote the book ‘An Introduction to Hair for Image Consultants and Stylists’
“As a former hairdresser, I would heartily recommend the ebook ‘An Introduction to Hair in relation to image’ to you all, it’s packed with knowledge and sound advice. I just wish all hairdressers were made to read it and do Kim’s Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis Course, it’d do them a world of good.” Loraine Birchall, UK
2) The National Training Manager for Wella UK who then hired me to re-vamp their enitre colour analysis training and to re-train all his Master Colour Trainers, and then the staff in the Wella flagship hair salons
Most independent hairdressers, stylists, colourists will not entertain even the idea of working with an image consultant. They feel you are encroaching on their area of expertise.
It’s sad to say but, in my 40+ years of experience, most ladies in the hair industry are not overly interested in business propositions like this. You’ve only to look at the BIG names in hairdressing over the years; they are 90% male – Vidal Sassoon, Nicky Clarke, Trevor Sorbie, Lee Stafford, John Frieda, Paul Mitchell.
Over the years, I have tried to talk about the advantages of learning basic colour analysis to my own hairdressers, male and female… it’s been like pulling teeth so I no longer bother.
Method 2
Save yourself time, money, and energy by investing in the Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis training course
I’ve already done all the research for you. This course contains everything I have learned from asking professionals and experts from the hair industry itself.
It is the ONLY hair colour analysis training course for image consultants on the planet
My research and work with Scott Cornwall and Wella UK provided at least 70% of the content of the Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis training course.
Included is Scott Cornwall’s book ‘An Introduction to Hair for Image Consultants and Stylists’ which shows you in 11 easy-to-read chapters how to:
- Correctly diagnose the right hair colour
- Understand hair colour charts
- Know which are the best colourant shades and methods to use
- Recognise those cuts and styles which work for and against
- Handle the subject of hair within the confines of a consultation
- Conduct your own expert Mini Hair Consultations – for you, your friends, and clients
You cannot get this book anywhere else in the world, except as an integral part of the Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis training course
A small snippet of what you’ll learn
In video 1 of Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis, we go through how NOT to speak to hair professionals about colour analysis, and then discuss what makes them far more amenable to what you have to offer.
How do I know this?
Because I flippin’ asked them!
This all stems from my extensive work with hair industry experts like Wella UK:
- The National Training Manager asked me to redesign Wella’s entire colour analysis training at their training college in Manchester, UK
- I trained their Master Colour Expert trainers, who now train all the Master Colour Experts who work in Wella hair salons
- I’ve been a guest speaker twice at the Wella Master Colour Congress, where I shared a stage with Edward Darling, Sassoon’s colour expert. I got him to wear gold earrings on stage! Darling by name; darling by nature!
- I’ve also trained several Wella flagship salons
- And the adorable National Training Manager personally put lilac/violet ‘slices’ into my cool pearl blonde hair. I looked and felt a million dollars!
If you’ve ever wondered how I do a personal colour consultation
then on video 4, you can watch me showing you exactly that, from start to finish, with a real-life colour consultation on one of the course attendees.
“This is so valuable and a great tool to have in your ‘tool box’.. ladies love to talk about their hair.. because most of the time it’s something they struggle with .. I very often dip into this … A good few years ago we sat at Kim’s and bombarded Scott with questions. I would really urge consultants who do colour / style or both to get this .. it is so valuable to the business we are in. It’s also a stand-alone workshop and really gets ladies talking.. Well worth investing in, even as a feeder for further business.” Diane Miller, UK
Want to know how to deal with all these hair possiblities?
- Fair-haired Autumns page 48
- Fair-haired Winters 49
- Dark-haired Winters 49
Grey hair 52 - White hair 52
- When our hair changes colour, do we change season? 53
- The effects of greying 53
- Testing for Cool or Warm grey hair for the 4 seasons 55
- Blondes 56
- True, natural blondes 56
- True blondes going grey 56
- Photos of film stars 57
- Dark-haired Springs 58
- Light-haired Springs 59
- When your client wants to change her hair colour 59
These are all covered on videos 5 and 6 on Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis. I’ve added the page number so you can find themeasily in the Course Notes.
Did you know?
In the world of hair, dark blonde and light brown are the same thing.
Apparently, those boxes of hair dye in the High Street deliberately use this type of terminology for the ‘poor’ public who don’t understand professional hair-speak.
As a hair colour expert, you have an opportunity to educate your clients about how to choose the right hair colours for them, especially if they decide to colour it themselves at home.
All is explained on video 2 of Fabulous Hair Colour Analysis, when we’re discussing how to define hair colours. You’ll also find a full list on page 18 in the Course Notes.
“This is a fantastic course. I found the content influenced my whole approach to colour analysis. Just more to offer your client.” Susan Clayton, UK
