NYFW Spring 2018: Rose Quart Hair Color Debuts at the Alexander Wang Show

It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Did we all get inspired by really, really cool-colored hair via Instagram, or did Instagram inspire really cool-colored hair? Yeah, I can’t answer that either. Regardless of how we got here, Alexander Wang’s flash-mob-of-a-runway show has made one thing clear: Pastel hair of the My-Little-Pony, Easter-egg, shimmery-mermaid variety isn’t just a social media fad. And it's definitely not going out of style. At least, not until next fall. Wang handpicked one model from his spring show to go from dark blonde to a shade Josh Woods, the Redken colorist who completed the color transformation, is calling ‘rose quartz’.

“The inspiration came directly from Alexander,” Woods said. “He had a very specific idea about this one color that he wanted in his show.” The sorta-pinky, sorta-orchid result isn’t actually just one color. It’s a bunch of colors — pink, violet, and coral — one transposed over the next, in the same way Snapchat lets you stack filters on top of one another until you look like a puppy goddess in the Lower East Side with absolutely no undereye bags. “I’m calling it rose quartz," said Wood. "It’s like you look at it, and you can see through colors into other colors. And it’s that faceted feeling that I really wanted to get."

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While you can easily buy and try the semi-permanent Redken City Beats Vibrant Conditioning Color Cream in the shades Woods used — Ballet Pink, East Village Violet, and Midtown Magenta — yourself, you’d need to lighten up your base to a silvery tone first to copy the exact color Wang and Woods dreamed up. That step alone took Woods a couple of hours, and a whole lot of Redken’s Ph Bonder (a bond builder that zips up the bonds broken during the bleaching process so hair stays healthy, instead of getting brittle and weak).

But if you’re up for the challenge, the results, Woods said, are as close to universally flattering as it gets. “Pink is a very flattering color, it suits a lot of skin tones,” he explained. “I mean, you don’t want to put pink hair on a very pink skin tone, like mine. But it’s a very forgiving color.”

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Read on for more on the latest hair trends:

1. Kim Kardashian Debuts Blonde Hair at New York Fashion Week (Update)
2. Texture on the Runway Shows the Versatility of Curls and Kinks at NYFW
3. The Gray Hair Trend: 32 Instagram-Worthy Gray Ombré Hairstyles

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