I'm a Model???
Tuesday, December 01, 2015
This post has been a long time coming, but it's finally here! On Sunday 9th August I got to be a model for a hairdressing competition. I finished the day with bright pink hair and half my head shaved. Next thing you know, three months later on Saturday 14th November a photo of me with my pink hair appeared in a museum!
So here it is, the beginning of a modelling side-career for me (apparently!)
my hair two weeks after the event, still very pink!
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Thanks to my connection with Mane Salon, I helped hairdresser Cheryl Fafeita enter the Wellington region of the New Zealand Association of Registered Hairdressers competition, where hairdressers from salons and tertiary centers are put head to head (geddit) to come up with the best hair styles on their models.
There's a variety of events that the hairdressers can compete in; The Cut (where they have 40mins to cut their model's hair), The Style (where they have 40mins to style the hair, not cutting allowed), and The Colour (where they have 5mins to prepare then show a dye job that had been done prior to the competition). Cheryl and I entered The Cut and The Colour.
Prior to the competition day I got my hair stripped of all it's natural colour, which turned it into a weird blonde-orange colour. I then got my roots coloured with a deep pink-purple dye. This made my hair look very weird to say the least. I also wasn't allowed to wash it until the day of the show, so I ended up living in beanies for a few days haha! Then on the morning of the competition Cheryl finished my dying with a hot pink and bright yellow colour on the remaining non-dyed hair.
photo credit to Janine Simons from the sideline
The competition itself was pretty hectic, us models had to sit very still while our hairdresser ran around our heads doing their thing; asking us to pass a pair of scissors, the hairdryer, some product, anything that you could manage to fit in your hands to easily pass up to them! In each leg of the competition there was about forty entries. At one point, the other lady from Mane Salon, Kiri Roberts had three models on at once and was running around between them all!
After the clock hit 00:00, all of the models had to line up and walk down the "catwalk" and pose at the end for the judges to have a look, then we walked back to our seat and wait for the judges to come around and have a real nosey at us. I have to say, that walk was intimidating, I've never done anything like a catwalk before and felt like a real newbie! Thankfully I didn't trip and all was well.
photo credit to Cheryl Fafeita from behind the photographer
Whilst the judges deliberated on who the finalists and winners of the day, our Mane Salon team raced back to our salon to get some photographs taken of all us girls. This was another first, a photoshoot! Luckily I didn't go first, and managed to watch the other models go and listened to the photgrapher so I had a feeling of what I was expected to do. The photoshoot itself wasn't as scary as I thought it was going to be, and these are the photos of me!
When we got back, Cheryl and I got fourth place for colour! One of the photographs (bottom left, below) was entered into a photographic competition later on and we placed as a finalist! Pretty good for my first go, I feel.
Photography by Anna Jamieson
Styled by Izzy Butte
Hair and makeup by Cheryl Fafeita
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NOW, onto the Museum Showcasing I was talking about earlier!
A few weeks after the competition had come and gone, I got a Facebook message from Cheryl saying that a new exhibition was opening up by Wellington Museum called The Attic which is a "tribute to Wellington and its region, revealing more of its quirky stories and celebrating the Capital’s past, present and future." And one of the photographs of me is going to be exhibited in it!
Naturally, as soon as the exhibition was open to the public, my boyfriend Conaugh and I went on a mission to the museum to see my face in a proper exhibition. And what else, this is a permanent exhibition that's going to be up for at least ten years! That means ten whole years a museum is going to show a picture of my face!
"I date a model!"
Inside The Attic exhibition there's a little section on hair, and within it there's a drawer you can open up that shows some of the new Kevin Murphy cruelty free products as well as some tools that Mane Salon use to cut and treat their hair. THEN, right in the corner, taking up a good portion of the display is a photo of me!
What I think I'm going to do is each year take a photo of myself with this photo like a proud mother and see how I change over the years to come.
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This was all such a surreal experience, and Cheryl has asked me to continue modelling for her in the future and enter the NZARH competition with her again next year; I wonder what exciting colours we're going to go with next year!
Thanks a lot to Mane Salon, Cheryl Fafeita and Wellington Museum for these opportunities.
- Louise
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