L'Oreal 100th Birthday bash in Paris!

Hi Again,
It’s been a while – I’ve been sunning myself in St Lucia and checking out Amy Winehouse at the Jazz she was brill. Also I’m having my second baby which is so exciting and thoroughly crazy you might add.
Well let me fill you in on the most incredible event of my career so far, I think I mentioned I have been invited to represent Saks H3 and myself at the 100th Birthday for L’Oreal.
This is how it went – I arrived three days before the main event for our intensive process of rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals … This is fairly unusual for an event normally you get a few hours to rehearse so that tells you the magnitude of this one.
I was one of nine of the H3 Creation Team from season 1 and 2 joining together, it was so interesting to get together with an international group of hairdressers swapping stories, learning about cultures and observing how differently we all work.
Our first meeting was with L’Oreal’s marketing department we were there to discuss new product launches and give our input on developing ranges/images and products. Next step we meet and prepared our four models. This is usually a tense moment for the hairdressers as we must get the right girl with the right length who will let us do what we have planned. As you can imagine with 36 models and 9 hairdressers we had some diva moments and tears. All a part of the job for me I was very happy with my choices and off we went into three days of rehearsal.
· Team rehearsal
· Model rehearsal
· Technical rehearsal
· Sound rehearsal
· Translation rehearsal
· Dress rehearsal
· Full rehearsal
Just to name a few … Phew … after all that I’m completely ready so off for dinner and an early night.
Early, early start – It’s show day. We have 4 shows running almost consecutively an the mind blowing thing was this event was reaching an audience of 4000 from 70 different countries …
The translation alone was a finely tuned machine from English to French to Malaysian or from French to Spanish to Lebanese and sooo much more.
All our shows went off with a bang, I was the opening act, creating a haircut in 4 minutes on long hair with 3 sections only. This proved to be a very popular shape, the crescendo for the show finished with all 9 H3 team working on stage for appox 1.5 mins changing our models into look 2. On speaking to the audience this moment gave many of them a high and me too.
We had a great time with a standing ovation on each show and photographs, interviews even some autographs to sign.
We then got whisked off to the Zenith which is like our Wembley Stadium and went to watch the other hairdressers or should I say rock stars do there bit. It was fabulous to see Aldo Copella, a 70 year old Italian legend hairdresser still going strong. Also Angelo Seminara and Trevor Sorbie was a journey and utterly fabulous!
Launched as well was L’Oreal’s new colour product ‘INOA’ this is a technological breakthrough which will be the beginning to L’Oreal going green with odorless colours completely scalp friendly, no ammonia and biodegradable. The hair feels in amazing condition and the tubes are tiny.
Well to finish of this wonderful trip we had our final night in the Grand Palace which is breath taking and all 4000 hairdressers had a sit down meal and off course a boogie. For me it was a big photo opp for many of the hairdressers found myself up and down like a bridges nightie posing and signing autographs to a sea of people shouting celebrity … celebrity – Wow what a memory to finish the show.
http://l'orealinspiration.com

Alison x