The story of COLOUR.BUG – available at Voodou!

COLOUR.BUG is most definitely one of the hottest and most sought after gifts at Voodou this Christmas.  These coloured hair powders transform your hair in an instant into a vibrant, fun and creative style.  COLOUR.BUG inventor and hairdressing guru Kevin Murphy tells us how the idea came about…

COLOR.BUG first came to me while seeing a video of the Holi Festival of Colour in India. People going mad throwing around coloured powder and having the time of their lives, this is a religious festival in India to mark the start of spring.
The colours are amazing and on a recent trip to India I was able to come across these powders and thought how amazing would it be to have them for our hair.

There was a shift in fashion and I was seeing bright techno colours in fashion everywhere and “colour blocking” were (should say was the words on everyobody lips) the word on everybody’s lips. The blends of colour that interested me were mixing camel with hot pink, and petrol blues with fluoro oranges. I thought it would be great to do these sorts of things with hair. We have had vertical colouring techniques for so long and thought it was time to create a more horizontal block of colour. By using the natural tones of hair I was able to create a horizontal line and block the hair with a hot pink powder.
 
 
Abby Lee was the first model I tried this on for Vogue last year in March. We gave her the dip dye effect in pink.

A light went on in my head and I thought why cant hair colour be as easy as applying makeup? So I started the long road of how to make this pigment powder into a product so that everyone could have it.

I started to see colour popping up on the catwalks in London, Milan and New York, and every time I did an editorial I wanted to add colour. A coloured powder gave the hair a great texture and it was a great way to really transform the hair in seconds.
It took quite a few times before we had it perfected. I thought it was going to just be a fad but I did another shoot in the May issue of Vogue and then I knew it was going to be a great thing to do.

  

Colour was starting to pop everywhere.
I loved this shoot because of the punk overtones.

The ethnic clothes allowed me to make the look like a punk dreadlock girl that went to festivals. I’m not a colourist, so it has been so much fun experimenting with bright colour. There have been some challenges along the way like getting blue to stay blue. I just did this recent story and wanted to do blue.

I loved the cool colours and the lady-like nature of the clothes. This shoot had lots of subversive details. The mixing of lady-like and punk, 60’s makeup with 40’s hair, boots that look like they are from the 70’s with shift dresses from the 60’s. It was those nostalgic details that made me want to go mad and put blue in the hair like a singer in a girl band.

 

I love the contrast of the pink soft clothes with soft hair and a shock of blue. Blue is really hard to keep in the hair. It kept on going green because the hair is essentially yellow and if you mix blue and yellow you get green.
I now know that you have to do a shade of lilac to the blue to make it show up as blue. I will endeavour to get some more shades of COLOR.BUG as soon as I can. It has been the most fun I have had in making a product. It has been a long road from India to the pages of Vogue to the realisation of an actual product, but it has certainly been so worth it
 
I hope you like the shoots and watch this space for new colours! 
 
Regards,
Kevin Murphy