FIREBIRD ©️ Madeline

The Firebird, In Flight - 2015

The Phoenix Collection

Madeline first sat in my chair over twenty years ago, at Daisy's Hair Shop in Warwickshire. She modelled Scarlet Flash, which ended up on the centre page of a national magazine alongside The late Trevor Sorbie’ work. Later, after growing her hair out, she modelled Bronze Plane for the Cubist Collection. Then years passed. The salon closed. Life happened, to both of us, in the way it does.

Over a decade later, Madeline sat in a chair again.No team, no studio lighting, no fanfare. Just a former stylist who wanted to occasionally do some hair transformations, and a model who was willing to come back and let her.

This is the fourth piece Madeline and I have made together. Four collections

Where it started

Madeline came to me with natural light brown hair, some highlights, blue eyes, no colour, no drama. The kind of hair most stylists would treat conservatively. I didn't do conservative. I took her through a full colour process — Wella Koleston first, to build deeper tinted sections that would give the piece shadow and structure, then direct hair dyes in vivid reds layered over the top so the colour would genuinely pop against those darker tones rather than sit flat. The cut was a structured bob with a heavy fringe but with texture built into the internal shape and the ends and crown engineered specifically so the piece could move. Sitting still, it was a bob. That was never the point of it.

The moment it became a firebird

The name came from what happened when the hair moved. Caught by air, by the hairdryer, by a turn of the head, the top layers lifted and separated while the heavier lengths at the front and sides stayed anchored. What that made, in motion, was unmistakable — wings rising from the crown, the body of the hair sweeping forward, red and darker tones splitting apart into something that read as feathers catching the light from different angles.

None of that was accidental. The graduation, the weight distribution, the texturing at the crown — all of it was built with this exact moment in mind. Still, it was a bob. Moving, Madeline's hair in these images is completely real and untouched — nothing about the hairstyle itself has been generated or altered. What AI provided was the garment and setting around it: the feathered fire-toned dress, the red suit with the golden phoenix at the shoulder. Those were built afterwards to give a real piece of hair artistry the kind of visual context its name deserved. The hair is the work. The editorial exists to serve it, not the other way round.

She honestly looked striking and i’m sure her towels and pillow cases thanked me for it.

Thanks Madeline and thankyou to the photographer who’s name has slipped my mind.

If I remember or you get intouch you deserve the credit