AURORA- ADRIANNA 2020
Aurora©
Adrianna 2020
Most people, when they picture "aurora-inspired" hair colour, are picturing something soft — a gentle balayage moving through violet, pink and teal, everything melting into everything else. Beautiful, wearable, safe.
That's not actually what the aurora borealis looks like at its most dramatic. The real northern lights are produced when charged particles collide with gases at different altitudes in the atmosphere — oxygen lower down producing green, oxygen higher up producing red and crimson, nitrogen producing blue and magenta. Each colour is a separate event, happening at a separate altitude, independently of the others. In a full display, the colours don't blend. They sit beside each other as distinct curtains — magenta beside green beside gold — moving together as one display while staying individually distinct.
This piece, created on Adrianna, took that less comfortable, more accurate reading. The purple, magenta, teal, gold and orange sit in defined sections with real edges between them, rather than melting into one another. That choice is what makes it abstract rather than commercial — it asks more of the eye, and more of the person wearing it, than the soft blended version would.It clearly has a different aesthetic feel than her transformation previous Suncatcher ©️ that had an integrated blended quality just as Amythyst ©️ which is more holographic gradient.
Made With What We Had
The original shoot happened after hours, against a white wall, on a mobile phone, in basic salon evening lighting — nothing more than what was available in the moment. Adrianna styled herself for it, bringing her own creative instinct to the glitter and the makeup. The beaded necklace she wore was my late mother's Butler and Wilson costume jewellery — pieces that, only now, software has allowed me to transform from a necklace into a complete top design. The whole composition was as much Adrianna's as it was the hair's.
Doing the best with what you have matters as much as the piece itself.
Colour Architecture
Aurora's companion piece in the same collection, Nebula©, reaches full-spectrum colour through controlled chaos — dye pressed onto paper, folded, transferred unpredictably onto hair. Aurora works the opposite way: placed, sectioned, deliberate. Every colour chosen and positioned rather than left to chance. Both pieces land on the same destination — extraordinary, full-spectrum colour — by opposite routes.
Aurora was meant to be the bold, abstract piece for photographs, with a plan to gently lift the direct colour afterwards and create a second, different look. Covid arrived before that second stage could happen, so this bold version is the one that remains.
AI tools (Grok, xAI) used to present Aurora in an imaginative editorial way on select images. The original photographs, captured in salon evening light with Adrianna wearing the beaded necklace, are shown for comparison. Hair colour, technique and design throughout are the original work of Karen Tonks.
