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Conscious Beauty: Oil Slick Color How-To
Kelsey Deuel, winner of the Bio Ionic Style Awards, looks to her own lifestyle choices—both artistic and environmentally ethical—for inspiration in this “oil slick” collection.
Elizabeth Jakaitis・Assistant Editor
2 min to read
Kelsey Deuel, winner of the Bio Ionic Style Awards, looks to her own lifestyle choices for inspiration in this “oil slick” collection.
As the grandprize winner of the Bio Ionic Style Awards, a hairdressing challenge that concluded with an onstage presentation and ceremony in Hollywood late April, Kelsey Deuel walked away with a prize package that included the opportunity to join a creative team in Los Angeles for a MODERN photoshoot. Deuel, whose winning look for the Style Awards featured a beautiful blonde and a “Retro Rockabilly” rolled half-up, half-down style, was inspired by her own lifestyle choices to play around with an “oil slick” color effect, so described because it resembles the iridescent colors produced by the mix of oil or gas in a puddle of rain water.
“The oil slick effect is a beautiful way to offer brunette clients creative color. You don’t need to do the same amount of pre-lightening and you can still achieve a beautiful rainbow swirl of color.”—Kelsey Deuel
“I’ve been a vegetarian and pescatarian for a while and I’m always thinking about how I can help bring more awareness to caring for the earth and being good citizens on this planet,” Deuel says. “We need to be careful of how we dispose of materials and always remember the effect it has on other living things. I’m weaving that message into this work.”
“ I wanted to create this very soft, subtle multi-dimensional effect that really shimmers under the light.”—Kelsey Deuel
This ambition and drive was illustrated in her deliberate choice of a model for this shoot. “It’s not easy to find Los Angeles models who are willing to have creative color, because so many models are also actresses,” she says. “They need to stay pretty conservative in their look.” But Deuel was so determined that one model, Annika, would best serve her creative vision that she spent the day before the shoot performing a color correction and then the day after, returning her brunette model to her original tone.
In both her approach to championing the earth and to staying true to her aesthetic, despite the effort, Deuel is a winner.
Hair: Kelsey Deuel
Photographer: Michael Pool
Fashion stylist: Julia Perry
Makeup: Ernesto Casillasl
Hair Assistant: Armineh Vartanians
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