Brad had gone bottle-black, "Access Hollywood" reported.
Stylists we talked to don’t expect the male masses to be reaching for the bleach or rocking the goth look as a result of Pitt’s examples.
But some say a lot more dudes are juicing their ’dos than you might think.
"Of the male clients who come in here, at least half get color," says Jerry Gordon of J. Gordon Designs in Chicago, part of a hairdressing dynasty that includes his daughter Katherine Gordon in Hollywood, who styled Pitt for Ocean’s Eleven.
Gordon hadn’t consulted his daughter about Pitt’s serial affairs of the hair – she was on location working on another movie. But he ventures that the changes are for roles, not romance. ("I don’t think he did it at home," Gordon said, though other stylists speculated that special friend Angelina Jolie might have been the motive. Her son Maddox has sported a mohawk, if that’s any indication of her unconventional tastes in male hair.)
Closer to home, Gordon says the most radical dabblers in dye tend to be in the entertainment industry too.
"We have a couple rock bands who come in here; one guy gets a mohawk and has it foiled and colored. There’s a producer who comes in here who tints his hair dark and his mustache too. There are certain things I won’t do – I had a guy come in here who was going to Vegas to do a show; he wanted his mustache bleached out to white and we said absolutely not," Gordon said. "The skin is much more sensitive than the scalp; bleach could burn it."
Tinting isn’t limited to skateboarders and music men, however, said Gordon and others, who didn’t name clients in the interest of discretion.
"A lot of gentlemen who are 40 or over are blending away their gray with semipermanent color," said Jennifer Hall, a stylist at Gentleman’s Barber in Naperville, Ill. "It covers 70 to 80 percent of the gray, so they still have some. So it’s not like, ‘Holy cow! George colored his hair!’ It’s like ‘he did something, but what?’ It lasts about eight weeks, so I do it every other haircut on guys. It just starts to rinse out."
More than half of her male clients have some sort of color process, she said, including highlights and lowlights. That’s greater than the 10 percent of men who said they use hair color in a survey by Men’s Health magazine and the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association.
Hall attributes the higher percentage at the Gentleman’s Barber to the privacy that a gender-specific salon affords. (In the survey, 24 percent of the 1,000 respondents also said they "would be embarrassed if people knew I colored my hair.")
Some stylists caution against too much bravery – and the especially brazen move to blond.
"Brad (Pitt’s) was horrific!" e-mails Arturo, the one-named wonder behind Arturo New York salon in Manhattan, whose tips have been in In Style magazine (www.arturonewyork.com). "That bright gold wouldn’t work on (supermodel) Gisele, never mind Brad. At his age, it’s a sign of a midlife crisis, obviously."
© 2005, Chicago Tribune.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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