Conversations on colour: sharon peake and adam bryant

Sharon Peake and Adam Bryant are creative partners at Ethos Hairdressing in Manchester, and former winners of HJ's Schwarzkopf Professional British Colour Technician of the Year. Sharon and Adam are also members of the L'Oreal Professionnel 20:20 Colour Collective; an elite group of colourists from across the UK. Here, we find out more about her life in colour. What do you love most about being a colourist? Colouring hair is the most exciting and progressive aspect of hairdressing and this will continue to improve and vary over time. We teach inspirational colour and enter colour competitions that enable us to play with colours, try new things and experiment on mannequin heads – some ideas don’t work and some mistakes are happy accidents that give us a new direction! In the salon it’s easy to know what we love because the love comes from our happy clients with beautiful colours. Even when the colour is extreme we make sure they feel beautiful! What do you think are the biggest challenges facing professional colourists in 2015? The biggest challenges facing colourists today is that more and more colour changes are becoming colour corrections. It’s a lot more complicated and getting the client to understand what's possible and what's not possible, and explaining the time involved with a colour change, can be difficult. Ethos has a honesty policy of explaining exactly what techniques and products we will use to achieve the best possible outcome. Our clients are becoming a lot more knowledgeable these days. What do you think is the most exciting thing about being a colourist in 2015? With the help of the internet, our clients are becoming more experimental and well researched. They come in the salon armed with images and inspirations on their phone rather than flicking through a book of styles. Clients still want our advice, but their own research gives them confidence and is a great starting point for a consultation. Creative colour for us has no boundaries and that is extremely exciting. What colour trend or technique are you most excited about for 2015? In 2015 we are most excited to discover more about blended colour and freehand colour. Blending techniques use different depths and tones that can work from roots to ends, front to back or side to side fusing the different shades together. Freehand colour is visually painting colours onto the hair, whether on the surface or all the way through the hair. We have also just started working with 3D colour, a way of placing colour in particular places without using foil. What one piece of advice would you give to trainee colourists who would love to be where you are now? The advice we would give to a trainee colourist is to immerse yourself in understanding and learning all the foundations of colour without getting blinkered. The possibilities of creating beautiful and creative colours are endless, so give yourself time to experiment on mannequin heads. Don't worry if an experiment doesn't work out; you have still learnt something!