Celebrity Hairstylist Adir Abergel on Creating Oscars Magic and Beyond

I’m thinking about someone like Kristen, and then someone like Nicole Kidman, and the two of them both have texture, but it’s extremely different. Could you tell us a little bit about how you think about styling hair that is so different? What sort of key products or techniques get the desired effect?

The first part of hair that you really want to tackle is the health of it, and getting your hair healthy enough that there is enough elasticity and enough moisture in the hair. Because when you remove all of the moisture, and when you remove the elasticity and if you over bleach it too quickly, and you blow up that cuticle, or you haven’t gotten your hair cut enough, what happens is that you end up not getting the most out of your hair. It’s kind of like working out, right. If you work out, you’re going to get the most out of your body. If you’re going to eat healthy, you’re going to get the most out of it. And I think that hair has not gotten the same love that we give to our face, we will wash our face, we will put a mask on it. We will use a NuFace or a ZIIP on it, we will go and get facials, but we rarely do that for our hair. And I really believe that we should treat our hair the same way that we treat our face. So that’s where it starts. And then it’s really approaching it in a way of understanding your hair and not always fighting it.

I feel like pretty much everyone has that moment, like the straight-haired girls want curly hair, the curly girls want straight hair. Just like love on your real texture.

Yes, and celebrate your real texture and then enhance it with the right things. If you have super curly hair like Nicole does, you tend to want to use hydrators first. So, things that are going to hydrate the hair, give it shine, and give it more elasticity and then you’re going to want to use a blow dryer. The secret with blow drying is tugging on it, but it’s not the heat. It’s letting it cool down. The cooldown is when you get everything to kind of stay in there, create the shine, create the movement, create the bounce, create the reflection in the hair. That’s incredibly important, flattening the cuticle and then letting the cuticle cool down before you take it out. Someone like Kristen, who has wavy hair, but tends to need a good foundation at her roots—it’s all about building the right architecture, the right foundation. So it’s about using a volumizer on her root, and creating some memory there. It lifts, it holds, and then the rest of your hair can dance.