344 SEPTEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
Long before Bleach
London became a hot spot
for the city’s hair-color
adventurers—with three
salons in the U.K. and an
inventive at-home product
range sold globally—co-
founder Alex Brownsell
was just a 19-year-old with a
makeshift salon in a room
in her flat. Called Heartbreak
Hair, as much for the leaky
ceiling as for the relationship
sagas unfolding in her chair,
this space was where Brownsell’s experiments with dip-dyeing
just the bottom section of lengths took off in 2010, earning her
name recognition and fueling an underground trend. (Lady
Gaga was an early adopter.) “It was an inspiring time, but people
would come around with a bottle of wine as payment, so it didn’t
really work out financially,” Brownsell recalls with a laugh. Nine
years later, when Brownsell isn’t lending her talent to Gucci
campaigns and maintaining Georgia May Jagger’s pastel pink–
tinted blonde, she’s dreaming up color looks, from “executive
grunge,” a peroxide fringe that can be dressed up or down, to
“med-sev” (medieval seventies), a warm sunshine blonde. “What
we’re cultivating with Bleach isn’t punk and isn’t referential
to any era; it’s very now,” she says. There are more exciting, au
courant ideas to come: This fall, Bleach will finally cross the
pond with a four-chair outpost slated to open in Los Angeles.
No longer shorthand for
teenage rebellion, vividly
tinted hair is having a major
fashion moment. Meet the
color guard making a fresh
case for expressive dye jobs.
Bright Future
ALEX
BROW NSELL
LENA OTT
BEAUTY
For a colorist who logged time in buzzy downtown New York
hair havens (Bumble and bumble, Ion Studio), Lena Ott
insists that the most formative part of her career was spent in
her Brooklyn apartment. There, away from the traditional
salon structure, she honed a freewheeling confidence in her
craft with clients such as Björk and model Anja Rubik, who
happily made the outer-borough trek. “When high-profile
people had no problem putting their head in my kitchen sink,
I knew that my own venture didn’t have to be the typical salon,”
Ott says, describing Suite Caroline, her intimate SoHo studio,
which opened in 2013 and has consistently served up the same
kind of outside-the-box color that she conjured for fall shows
such as Sies Marjan and Saint Laurent, where BEAUT Y>346
BIG PINK
SHADES OF ROSE
IN BOLD AND ICY
ITERATIONS HAVE
BEEN “THE CATALYST”
FOR THE LATEST
HAIR-COLOR CRAZE,
SAYS LENA OTT.
VLIFE
SØLVE SUNDSBØ/ART+COMMERCE
