You know you have found Josh Wood’s West London salon before checking the address. Tucked behind Holland Park station, the building is painted entirely black and covered in bright-yellow heart-eyes emojis. It should not work. Instead, it is impossible to pass without smiling.
The contrast feels appropriate for JOSH Wood, one of the most influential figures in British hair colour. He combines establishment credentials with an instinct for play, moving between fashion-week backstages, famous clients and his role as Global Creative Director at Redken. He is also the co-founder of Josh Wood Colour, created to bring professional-quality colour into people’s homes.
The interior of Josh Wood Colour
When lockdown hit in March 2020, I had only just had my highlights redone. As the months passed, my hair grew drier, my curls stopped curling, and my mood plummeted. By December, I realised I no longer identified with my blonde self. Add heartbreak to the equation, and you get the picture.
The way forward, I decided, was backwards. I dyed my hair back to its natural dark colour in an attempt to return to myself, free from the past. It did not work. Once you have been blonde, you can never truly go back.
The exterior of Josh Wood Colour
I spent months trying to adjust to my natural colour, but every time I looked in the mirror, my hair had become a signifier of pain. Talk about attaching meaning to meaningless things.
Eventually, I stopped trying to make peace with it and decided that I wanted myself back. Or perhaps a new self. What I wanted was a middle ground between the platinum blonde I had been in 2020 and the dark blonde staring back at me in May 2021. I know I sound like Carrie Bradshaw after Big left her at the altar, only considerably less glamorous.
The interior of Josh Wood
There is a general lesson here: do not change your hair because someone tells you they need to stop dating people they are not serious about. This is not a profound revelation about you. It is evidence that they are dense.
Which is how, in May 2021, I find myself sitting opposite my colourist, Issie Churcher, at Josh Wood. We speak at length about what I want to achieve. I explain my plans to return to blonde. She listens carefully and then flatly refuses.
“What do you mean?” I ask, watching my dreams collapse in real time.
“If you go fully blonde again, you’ll leave the salon carrying your hair in a plastic bag,” she says. “It’s too damaged.”
Thanks for the tough love.
Issie then tells me something my therapist should have said months earlier: look at what you have, accept it and make the best of it. She is right. Perhaps the journey towards self-acceptance really can begin behind the doors of a hair salon.
The interior of Josh Wood Colour
We settle on a full-head balayage and a trim. A trim. I never cut my hair. I have always been a long-haired blonde.
Twenty minutes later, I am sitting in stylist Nicholas Hardwick’s chair.
“Are you nervous?” he asks.
“Are you being sarcastic?” I reply.
I watch the silver scissors move through my hair with extraordinary dexterity, delicacy and precision. When I finally glance in the mirror, I cannot even tell that he has cut it.
Nicholas, just a heads-up: I’m never leaving you.
The interior of Josh Wood Colour