It has some of the wildest, weirdest, and most exotic hairstyles you’ve probably ever seen. The Sebastian Hair Design What’s Next Awards competition is filled with some highly artistic creations from 40 of North America’s greatest talents.
Count three of St. Albert’s finest hairstylists among those 40. Meghan Page, Courteney Brown and Jennifer Foo are in the semi-final round of the competition.
At 19, Brown is likely one of the youngest hairstylists in the field of contenders. A graduate of Paul Kane’s hair design program and hairstylist at Bliss Hair By Design on St. Anne Street, she’s excited to be up against some more seasoned professionals like Foo who has owned and operated X-treme Creations Hair Company in Akinsdale for more than a decade now.
Her creation can probably best be described as a long purplish corkscrew ponytail with zippers decorating three small French braids around the model’s ear.
“They give you a book and you look through all the photos of what they’ve chosen to be on trend. The whole book has lots of simple hairstyles but it also has lots of hairstyles with mixed materials in them. That was the goal this year. I picked zippers. I ended up sewing the zipper to her hair,” she explained.
The whole process took ten hours. She noted that it only took about half an hour to undo everything.
“It was a long day.”
As for Foo, her creation took about eight hours. It shows a model with a head full of tight French braids, one of which looks like it has draped over the ear to connect with the ponytail tightly constructed to maintain a series of progressively smaller spheres of hair. Finally, there’s a wisp of bangs to outline the face.
“What inspired me was the ability to put different shapes and textures together, and to create something that was interesting to look at,” she began, noting that the original Sebastian collection had a lot of simplicity and she wanted to represent that as best she could. “When you look at all the wild, crazy hairstyles, I just laid down the simplistic piece.”
She’s thrilled to have her spot in the running. It’s been a long time since she’s done anything like it.
“It’s quite exciting,” Foo exclaimed. “When I was younger, I actually entered some competitions and did more work like this. I haven’t done anything like this in over 20 years. The opportunity presented itself and I was feeling creative and thought, ‘Why not?’”
Page was unavailable for comment.
People can see all of the semi-finalists and place their votes at www.sebastianwna.com/national-competition before this Friday. Nine of the competitors will then move on. The finals will take place in Dallas on March 5. As of yesterday morning, Page had 279 votes, Brown had 404 votes, and Foo was leading all of the contenders at 861 votes.
