Page 8 - January-February 2020 HER

8 JAN/FEB HER
HER Beauty
the whole color wheel, Efird strutted into Curl Up ‘N Dye a few years later with green hair, torn up pantyhose, Doc Martens and a Misfits shirt. She found the place where she’s been since 2014 and retained many of her original clients in Hot Springs.
“When I first moved here, there weren’t any hairdressers I knew that did the colors I did in the way that I did them. They did vivid colors but it was a single color or a chunk of color. They didn’t bleach out your entire head and make it a rainbow or melt the color down from one color to the next. The whole scene fashion was a big thing when I moved here. There were kids doing coontails in their bathroom and they weren’t looking as good as the ones who came and paid me to do it the way I did it. I still encouraged them to do it themselves because that’s how I started,” she said.
“And when I left the mall, I still car- ried that clientele and it was all word- of-mouth and it was so bizarre. I’ll do somebody with holographic rainbow hair or ombre color melt that’s all vivids and then my next client is a 75-year-old woman that just wants a trim up. Once I went to Curl Up, there was a tidal wave of hairdressers on Instagram that started getting credibility for their work because you could post real-time what you just did, you know? And I think I gained quite a few followers from that. And one of my friends, Sherry, who’s internet famous, gassed up me all the 8 JAN/FEB 2020 ¯ HER MAGAZINE
time so people just started being like ‘Hey, I saw your work on Instagram or Facebook’ or ‘This girl I know said you did her hair.’ And like I said, I have a wide, crazy range of clients. It’s not all just vivids.”
Efird explained part of her process and experiences of helping clients pick the color they want.
“Vivids are like paints. You can do more with them creatively than regular hair color. It’s like having a pallet. Make you I pick up basic colors and mix them. Kind of like you mix paints to make the shade. So it’s completely customized. A lot of people who want vivid colors already have color in their hair so it’s not like you have a completely virgin base of hair. You have to figure out ‘How am I going to remove this old hair dye and still make it look cool?’ I really enjoy formulating types of things,” she said.
“I just kind of work with them. A lot of the time it’s usually cost and time. I can do something off Pinterest, abso- lutely. But it might take me all day so you’ll have to be able to accommodate me for six, eight hours of work and all of the products used. So a lot of times when people figure that out, they’re like ‘Oh, that’s not what I wanna do. Here’s my budget.’ And I basically work off their budget and say ‘What do you think about this? And then your next session, we’ll get it closer.’ It’s not a one size fits all, you know? Sometimes you have to work to get what you want. It doesn’t always happen all at once,” she said.