The extraordinary lengths celebrities will go to for great hair

As far as diva antics go, you could say Coleen Rooney conducts hers with a modicum of modesty. In her new book My Account, the footballer’s wife who turned ‘Wagatha Christie’ in a much-publicised 2022 social media scandal, recounts the time in 2006 when she jetted home from the World Cup in Germany just to get her “straggly mop” of hair extensions sorted out. 

Amongst the gaggle of WAGs vying for the world’s attention, “a girl had to look her best”, she says. “But my extensions were starting to fall out and I couldn’t find anyone in the town of Baden-Baden to work with the type of sewn-in hair pieces I’d had put in just before the tournament”. 

Feeling her hair was her strong point and desperate to look the part, the then-20-year-old felt she had no choice but to surreptitiously hop on a flight back home to Liverpool. “But it was Ryanair all the way,” she assures us, not wanting anyone to think her new-found stardom had gone to her… head. Wayne’s cousin fixed her wefts, she got on the next flight back to Germany, and all was well with the world (if not the outcome of her husband’s competition). 

It’s a reminder of a truth many of us would have to acknowledge if pressed: in the pursuit of Good Hair and the priceless sense of confidence it can give us, we are prepared to go far. And, judging from what the nation’s top hairstylists will reveal, the rich and famous will go ever further.

The running theme throughout? Planes, trains and automobiles… and not of the budget airline kind. 

“Over the years, I’ve had to attend to people’s roots under some pretty extreme circumstances,” says uber-colourist Josh Wood, who’s worked on everyone from David Bowie to Kylie Minogue. 

“Once, after turning up in Nice for a client’s ‘regular’ appointment, I was told she had boarded her yacht and I would need to drive to the nearest port. En route, we were informed the boat had moved so I would be helicoptered onto the vessel. The landing of the chopper on the yacht on exceptionally choppy seas was an unforeseen test of my nerves, and once I finished my work, I realised the boat had moved countries. Getting home was quite the struggle.”

Michael Charalambous, a society hairstylist who first cut Claudia Winkleman’s iconic fringe, enjoyed an easier journey when he was flown out to Ivana Trump’s yacht to do her hair. It did, however, seem an excessive effort, even for a man used to tending to the whims of royalty, oligarchs and first ladies: the job was a three-minute fringe trim.

Paul Percival, founder of Percy & Reed and hairstylist to Björk and Rita Ora, experienced something similar when his client Princess Reema of Saudi Arabia flew him out to Japan where she was attending a state dinner. On completing his assignment, he was flown back straight away – it was in first class, so it wasn’t too gruelling. The job? Putting her hair up in order to display a pretty tiara.

The great and good won’t always allow their high-flying hairdressers to finish their journeys before starting their work. “I had to lift someone’s roots on a tour bus from Leeds to Wembley Arena,” recalls Wood. “The coach didn’t offer the best facilities for precision bleaching, it has to be said.” 

The circumstances were marginally better for Luke Hersheson, celebrity stylist to Victoria Beckham and Dua Lipa, when cutting and styling someone’s hair on a private jet en route to an important meeting. “I finished while the plane landed and watched her being whisked off the runway in a car,” says Hersheson. “These people’s schedules are so back-to-back, every minute counts.”

Hersheson came up with an ingenious way to accommodate some clients; necessitated by the vagaries of Covid. “During the pandemic, a very famous tycoon needed his regular haircut but couldn’t fly to see me. So I ended up FaceTiming instructions to one of the members of his glam squad (who were, presumably, in his ‘bubble’). I kept it simple, so it worked out alright. You need to be flexible in these situations.”

While we may eye-roll at the insane expense rich people are prepared to shoulder in the name of vanity, plenty of similar decisions are made in the real world, where even in the midst of a never-ending cost of living crisis, hair budgets are often the last to be cut. 

“I find that if people find a colourist or stylist who does their hair well, their loyalty to them is put first,” says Percival. “Their concession is to come in less often and tide themselves over with root colour sprays or innovative styling tools, but they won’t compromise on the person and the trust they feel for them in favour of someone who might be cheaper.”

At-home “tiding over” solutions are also brilliant these days, so your hairstyle shouldn’t really have to suffer no matter how long you may have to hold off on seeing your mane man or woman. 

The best buys for expensive-looking hair on a budget 

Revlon One-Step Style Booster, Boots, £34.99

“This is the best big-hair styler I’ve ever used,” says Telegraph beauty director Lucia Ferrari. “Using this to dry, smooth and wave your hair all at once, plus 10 minutes of big velcro rollers, will give you a voluminous finish that’s genuinely nearly as good as a salon visit.”

The Wavemaker, Hershesons, £149.50

This “automated curl creator” is exactly that. Forget struggling to wrap hair around scalding tongs or getting rollers Velcro-ed into your lengths – simply feed strands of blow-dried hair into the Wavemaker’s rolling barrel and watch them get gobbled up, then reappear as a perfect mermaid wave. There are settings to suit your hair type, an in-built cooling system to set your style, and buttons to determine the direction of your waves. Miraculous.

Root Touch-Up Blending Brush, Josh Wood Colour, £19

When the nation couldn’t leave the house to get roots done, we turned en masse to Wood’s professionally designed at-home regrowth solutions. These three-day grey coverage paints with built-in precision brush, in a range of shades, will effortlessly make your roots disappear, whether you have a red carpet to negotiate or not.