Frédéric Fekkai

I posted last month about the Best of Beauty Awards I put together for Procter & Gamble. It was such an exciting challenge, and I worked with such a great team! I mentioned in passing that a hair style maven named Frédéric Fekkai was a featured guest at the event, and spoke during the award show.

I thought I would give you all a little more info about this interesting French fellow. First of all, it was an honor to meet a self-made success of these proportions. As recently as the 80s, Frédéric was hand-mixing ingredients in his kitchen sink to make his own shampoo and conditioner. He now helms an incredibly successful product line (just sold it to P&G for who knows what) and is regularly in movies and on television as a hair/style guru (like Zoolander- he played Derek’s hairstylist, America’s Next Top Model and Shear Genius- he was a judge).

One of Frédéric’s claims to fame is that he was the first person to charge $200 for a haircut (that was in 1986- I guess he wasn’t mixing shampoo for long!), and when he was still doing hair in 1996, his cuts went for $500 a pop! WOW! He currently has a hair conditioning product on the market that retails for $195. (Seriously?)

Remember those ads that said “My name is Vidal Sassoon, and I LOVE Beautiful Hair”? We all used to laugh at those because Vidal obviously thought he knew something mystical about Beauty and Hair that the rest of us NEVER would. Well, Frederic came out with some pretty hair-raising statements of his own. I didn’t know whether to be amazed, stunned, or put off when he said,

“When I run my hands through a woman’s hair, I feel who she can be.” or

“Styling is not about hold… it’s about self expression”.

I’m not totally sure what that means (you can be the judge!), but my thought is that you better be a GQ type guy with a French accent to pull off comments like that! :)

Pictured above is me & Fekkai at the After Party. I think my hair actually looks better by just standing next to him!