Your Best-ever Hair Colour

Who says brown has to be boring? With so many different shades out there, we get hair colour experts to prove this season’s hottest colour has a hue to suit every lifestyle, skin tone and personality.

Portrait of Tammy Strobel
Who says brown has to be boring? With so many different shades out there, we get hair colour experts to prove this season’s hottest colour has a hue to suit every lifestyle, skin tone and personality.
L’Oréal Professionnel/VLOOK by Majirel Cool Cover series
L’Oréal Professionnel/VLOOK by Majirel Cool Cover series

Shiseido Professional

We all know how frustrating it can be to look through pages of Pinterest boards and end up with zero relatable #hairspo. After years of research, the experts at Shiseido found that Asian skin contains more melanin than Caucasian skin, and tends to be more reddish than yellowish. This applies to black Asian hair as well.

With Shiseido Professional’s first Singapore Colour Collection, its colourists will customise a unique hair colour design for you, using a yellow-brown base as a starting point. This base colour works to subdue the reddish hue of black Asian hair, enabling cool-colour pigments to produce pure and clear colours. From there, the stylists will vary their application techniques, playing around with nuanced colours that change subtly in different lighting. Time to start pinning the colour designs created especially for the three local influencers below:

My Reading Room

Justin Javier, International Director of Shunji Matsuo, created a cool ash brown exterior to reflect Sherry Ang’s professional and entrepreneurial side, gradually fading to a warmer brown shade representative of her softer, more artsy self.

My Reading Room

A subtle gradation of darker to lighter lavender tones adds depth, while a cool ash brown exterior that gradually fades to a warmer brown further enhances Narelle Kheng’s artistic attitude, as dreamed up by Eiji Nakamura, Director of Pele Hair Salon in Tokyo.

L’Oréal Professionnel/VLOOK by Majirel Cool Cover series
L’Oréal Professionnel/VLOOK by Majirel Cool Cover series

L’Oréal Professionnel

In line with the cool colour trend taking centrestage this season, L’Oréal Professionnel’s Majirel Cool Cover collection consists of an array of shades that neutralise warm tones, offering opaque coverage and deeper, cooler tones minus the brassiness.

Launching in September 2015 and created to complement Asian skin tones, ask your stylist which of the brown shades below suits you best at your next salon visit. FYI: the front number refers to the base colour, with the colours going lighter as the numbers go up – five being slightly lighter than Asian hair and seven, a dark blonde – while the numbers behind refer to different tones.

Majirel Cool Cover 5.18 – ash mocha

Majirel Cool Cover 6.11 – double ash brown

Majirel Cool Cover 7.17 – ash matte

Redken

The newest update on brown includes blending it with a shade from the other end of the hair colour rainbow… blonde! This Autumn, Redken launches Bronde Sombre, a professional colour technique in which brunette and blonde come together for a gorgeous, low-contrast soft ombre effect.

For Asian skin tones, Redken’s education manager Shirley Tiong recommends a strong focus on shades such as Mocha and Pearl (new shades from Redken’s Chromatics Prismatic Permanent Color professional salon hair colour range) along with classic ash, mahogany and violet tones.

According to Redken Artist Sean Godard, who created the Bronde Sombre looks on the right for UK It Girls Amber Le Bon and Ashley Moore, “Clients are asking for something new and fresh, and with sombre, we have the answer. It’s a softer transition, so you don’t necessarily see where it starts and stops. It’s a lot more natural, a lot more tone-on-tone.”

My Reading Room

“For Ashley’s look, we used really rich, warm brunette tones. It’s an update on the traditional beachy ombre.” 

My Reading Room

“Amber’s look is inspired by Hollywood hairstyles that we’re seeing now… very soft and natural, with the subtle lightness and dimension you’d get from being in the sun.”