Lady Gaga's Colorist Patti Song on Achieving Her Signature Blonde Hair
On Friday, December 28, Lady Gaga kicked off Enigma, her hotly anticipated year-long residency at MGM Resort’s Park Theater in Las Vegas. Ahead of the show’s debut, she switched up her hair color twice in one week, leading Little Monsters everywhere to wonder what looks she might have in store for her latest blowout performance.
Topping herself off with several electric-blue wigs of varying shapes and lengths — a nod to the show’s space-age futuristic theme — Gaga showed yet again that she’s never one to shy away from a rainbow-hued hair color moment.
But despite her inclination toward an ever-changing coiffure, Mother Monster’s platinum blonde locks are perhaps her most enduring lewk. As any hair dye devotee who has tried to keep those pesky dark roots at bay and maintain some semblance of color consistency can attest, a successful transition to ice-blonde is a job best left to the professionals. And when you’re Lady Gaga, you’ve definitely got the cream of the crop at your beck and call.
In a new interview with Refinery29, Gaga’s longtime colorist, Patti Song, dished on how she brought the superstar’s hair back to the edge of glory after some serious breakage.
Reviving Gaga’s once-“squirrel’s tail” mane (as Song described it) involved a regular rehab routine of extensions, wigs, and a lot of professional TLC. Scheduling bleach sessions every three weeks and cropping Gaga’s hair into a short bob solved the underlying issues of dryness, dullness, and breakage, while Gaga’s love affair with wigs helped to stave off further damage that consistent processing can wreak on already distressed tresses. To protect new growth, Song told R29 that she utilized the virgin bleach application method, in which bleach is applied to the bottom of the hair and then up toward the root, reducing virgin hair’s processing time. Et voilà! A star was born.
As Gaga’s go-to for laying down that platinum base, Song proves that the proper application of hair color is both an art and a science. The rainbow hair may come and go, but for our queen, platinum is forever.
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