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I had the most amazing time this past weekend hanging out with my mentee, Natalie Fox - one of the 6 Matrix Spread the Love Graduates traveling throughout the U.S.A. touching a million lives and experiencing all this industry has to offer. It was funny, we were supposed to have our time together in March, but a travel mishap created a new opportunity that expanded our original 22 hours together to 50, and what a great time for my family.
Natalie arrived Friday, landing around 4:00pm, we stopped by home to drop bags quickly and ran off to the softball field where my girls were practicing. There, she met my mom, sister from California, her two kids, our daughter Claire, and Leah my wife (and secret to our success)…that's a lot. I had to run back to the car quickly, and when I returned, Natalie was deep in conversation with my sister and I knew this was going to be good.
Saturday we went to the studio, Leah was working at the desk, so we all went in, Emma and Claire helped work the desk and served the guests beverages while Natalie and I got to work. Natalie was serving as our surprise guest stylist and cut two ColorPlay winners (ColorPlay was a haircolor and technology experience Matrix Artistic Educators had at our Irvine and Tampa Trainings in January) and colored one additional winner. While Natalie was creating, I was too, making hair fabric for this weekends Emiliani 4D Experience. It was fun watching Natalie create as she took the colored mannequins and used the inspiration pictures provided by the teams via Dropbox to create the cuts and styles before finishing the cuts based on the inspirations from the teams. Her technique was good and Natalie finished the mannequins with great attention to detail, truly honoring the winning team’s effort and ideas. As Natalie worked, I did too on my model "Z," creating a very avant garde style using synthetic hair that I laid out in fine layers on wax paper, sprayed with spray adhesive and then pressed between wax paper. I then practiced what I had first created on a mannequin, taking the hair fabric and gathering it at the center, collapsing it, creating flower like shapes that had gradated colors from the hair fabric. It’s funny, my 30 sec elevator test is beautiful, sexy, believable hair and this style was beautiful - yes, sexy -yes, believable? ah NO, but too cool not to do.
Sunday was Easter, and Natalie, my girls and our two dogs went for a walk at Jacobsburg Park, and while we were there we even worked in a haircolor lesson while on our walk before we went off to my other sister’s house where Natalie meet everyone at Easter Dinner. We are so lucky to be in this industry, for the people it brings into our lives, and for me, the amazing experiences coloring hair has allowed me to have. My life Celebrates Color in some way every day!
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