Carriers of the Torch, in a Chorus of Red Hair

LAST June, in the middle of her “Last Girl on Earth” tour, the R & B pop diva Rihanna strutted onto the Rock in Rio stage outside Madrid with the sides of her head shaved and a bowl cut of hair dyed matador red — the color of blood and passion and showmanship. Since then, Rihanna’s red has evolved further, from a voluminous Elmo-red wig while shooting the “What’s My Name” video on the Lower East Side in September to fire-engine-hued extensions during Paris Fashion Week this month. 

 

“The album was called ‘Loud,’ and it just fit,” Ursula Stephen, Rihanna’s hairstylist, said about the singer’s new CD and the decision to make her a redhead. “It made the statement she wanted to make.”
But right now red hair is not just one woman’s statement — it’s a chorus. The subtly auburn girl-next-door actress Emma Stone, of “Easy A” and “Superbad,” made her “Saturday Night Live” debut last weekend. Scarlett Johansson and Eva Longoria both gave themselves red highlights in the last year, while the “Twilight” actress Kristen Stewart attempted a strawberry blond. And her “Twilight” co-star Bryce Dallas Howard also fires up the red carpet with flaming locks.
During New York Fashion Week, the British luxury leather brand Mulberry sent models with thick-banged cherry-colored wigs stomping around the Soho House’s rooftop pool. YSL features the flame-tressed model Karen Elson in new ads for Opium perfume. The auburn-haired Julianne Moore is on the cover of the November issue of Allure, while Christina Hendricks, of “Mad Men,” who has perhaps done more to reinvigorate the color than anyone else, appears on the November cover of Harper’s Bazaar.
“Out of all the colors it makes the most statement — it infers personality,” said Lucia Mace, the stylist on “Mad Men” who is responsible for maintaining the locks of Joan Holloway, the hip-wiggling, smoldering executive assistant played by Ms. Hendricks. “Red is wild and sexy and powerful,” Ms. Mace said.
Recently, it’s taken on a rocker tinge as well. Cameron Mesirow, who records as Glasser, was a CMJ Music Festival darling earlier this month. Ms. Elson, who is also a hugely popular British folk singer, famously dyed her hair red after meeting Ms. Hendricks more than a decade ago. And Florence Welch, the flame-haired British pop-soul frontwoman of Florence and the Machine, has been dying her hair since she was 9, inspired by her favorite Disney character, Ariel, from “The Little Mermaid.”
“It has been all different colors — bright red to more auburn-y-brown red,” she said by telephone from London, between studio sessions. It wasn’t until 2008 that Ms. Welch went with her trademark auburn. “This kind now is the one that suits me best,” she said. At the MTV Video Music Awards in September, her curly tendrils were laid across a bed like seaweed as she performed “Dog Days Are Over,” the soaring opening to her album “Lungs.” (The tune was also featured in the trailer to another famous redhead’s recent movie: Julia Roberts’s “Eat Pray Love.”)
“There’s kind of a big mythology around redheads,” Ms. Welch said, referring to the more fantastical and romantic side of it. “There’s something kind of magical about red hair.”
For another musician, Hayley Williams, the frontwoman of pop-punk band Paramore, red is the color of rebellion. When her band was in the studio recording its breakout 2007 album, “Riot!,” “I decided I wanted to look like an Anime character,” Ms. Williams wrote by e-mail from a tour stop in Australia. “I had my hair 3 or 4 different colors and the orange would fade to this highlighter green around my face. That was definitely my favorite.”
She has had what she called “ginger fever” since she was 14 and is no longer sure what her natural color is. Being a redhead is a “form of self-expression to me,” Ms. Williams wrote.
Ms. Mace, the “Mad Men” stylist, said that although Ms. Hendricks, a natural blonde, has been dying her hair since she was a preteen, the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, decided that Joan Holloway’s hair needed to match the Lucille Ball-inspired shade that was popular at the time. “We brightened up her red,” Ms. Mace said. “I get a lot of letters about her hair color from people asking how do I get it. People love that red on her.”
But Sharon Dorram, of Sally Hershberger, a sovereign New York colorist who has handled Nicole Kidman’s signature strawberry blond locks and Julia Roberts’s auburn tresses, said that her New York clients haven’t generally warmed to the hue. “When they see red in their hair, it freaks them out,” she said.
Nikki Ferrara, a colleague of Ms. Dorram’s, speculated that “it could be a social stigma thing.”
“Like some people think redheads are a little batty,” she added. “Or it’s one of those head-turning colors, and people don’t want that much attention from it.”
Blue- or green-eyed ladies with cream-colored skin carry the look best, Ms. Dorram said, adding: “If one has gray hair, dying it red can make it look artificial very easily.”
But a new generation of redheads is explicitly seeking the artificial look. Whitney Scott, a colorist for the hair salon Woodley & Bunny in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said that a recent client, a German woman, asked for “ ‘Sesame Street’ red.” Ms. Scott, herself no square with an armful of tattoos, suggested something more natural.
Ms. Scott’s specialty for redheads is balayage, a form of hair coloring designed to create natural-looking highlights, popularized by celebrities like Drew Barrymore and Sarah Jessica Parker. Instead of “essentially cooking hair” in foils and coloring the hair in blocky sections, Ms. Scott said, she paints the color right onto her clients’ hair so that it blends more naturally with their own shade and grows out without developing drastic-looking roots. “It’s a lot more forgiving ,” she said (and pricey, at up to $300).