Gwen Stefani’s Haircare Routine Is Insane

EVER since she burst to fame 20 years ago with the era-defining hits Just A Girl and Don’t Speak, No Doubt frontwoman Gwen Stefani has been known for her immaculate, platinum-blonde hair.

For two decades now we’ve barely seen a peroxided hair out of place from the stunning singer. Now, Gwen’s own personal hairstylist, Danilo, has revealed exactly how much work goes into creating and maintaining that perfect look, each and every day.

“The truth is Gwen’s hair has a career too. It has to entertain, it has to perform,” he tells E! News in a new interview, divulging just how much attention is paid to her famous locks.

“When I was coming up, I remember I was told that Marilyn [Monroe] would have her hairstylist come touch up her roots every 10 days … with a Q-tip. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow that’s a lot!’” Danilo laughed.

But as it turns out, Danilo’s routine with Stefani is even more stringent: touch-ups every seven to eight days.

“I know roots are in right now … but I don’t like them on her. I want her to look seamless,” he said.
And for those wondering how Stefani, a natural brunette, keeps her hair healthy and nourished despite constant bleaching, Danilo’s about to let you in on a little secret.

“We haven’t used bleach since 2004. I developed a high-lift formula that achieves the same effect but saves the quality of her hair. I did a lot of research and really looked at places of origins for blonde hair colour like Germany and Scandinavia. I’ve spent years finding and testing new lines and technology.”

Danilo says he colours, washes and treats Stefani’s hair once a week, leaving her to sit with a pack of deep conditioner for around 45 minutes.

But his real secret weapon? The reason his famous client has been able to maintain shimmering platinum blonde hair for so many years without damaging the strands?

Danilo styles with conditioner. Yep, very flawless hairstyle you see Stefani rock has been created using “layers of conditioner”.

“She gets multiple types of deep conditioning every day,” he reveals, which cancels out the damage to Stefani’s hair caused by the constant colouring.

Now we just need someone else from Stefani’s inner circle to explain why she looks younger today than she did in 1996 ...

Hair Care Tips for Colored and Naturally Red Hair

Red hair is just beautiful. It's really no surprise why poets and painters have tried to capture the beauty of red hair with their words or their canvasses since time immemorial. Fiery titian locks evoke images of dancing flames, of sunrises and sunsets, of energy and passion.

If you have red tresses, it's only right that you celebrate the glorious color of your hair. And because red hair is special, you should also take especially good care of it to keep healthy, manageable and vibrant. Here are hair care tips that can help you maintain the beauty of your ginger mane.

Never go out under direct sunlight without any covering for your head. Exposure to direct sunlight is bad enough as it is because it can cause heatstroke and dehydration. It can also cause your hair to dry, and if your hair is ginger-colored, the beautiful color of your tresses can fade as well. Whether natural or applied, red pigments are vulnerable to sunlight and can wash out very easily.

Natural red hair is also naturally coarse and prone to drying, splitting and breakage. To prevent this kind of damage to your ginger strands, it's important that you feed your locks with moisture regularly and generously. So, be lavish with conditioning your tresses. Wash your hair with conditioner every day and coat it with leave-on conditioner or hair serum. Every week, pamper your mane with deep conditioning. You should also shampoo less often - no more than once a week - to allow your strands' natural oils to do their work in nourishing and protecting your mane.

As much as possible, use products appropriate to your ginger hair. There may not be a lot of hair care products available that specifically cater to redheads, given that there are only so few natural redheads out there. But a thorough Internet search will yield some good results and lead you to great products for your fiery tresses. If you're not a natural redhead, you should use hair care products particularly designed for colored hair.

If you feel that you need to enhance the red highlights of your hair, you can rinse it with cranberry juice after washing it. Cranberry juice is very effective in bringing out the red in hair. Just be careful not to stain your clothes, your towels or any important household linen with cranberry juice, however.

Always be gentle when handling your ginger hair. Red tresses are naturally fragile. So, make it a point to be careful when dealing with your hair. Avoid yanking or tugging at it so its strands won't snap off. Additionally, try to minimize styling it with heat-based styling tools. Red hair doesn't take heat too well and so should be protected from it. If you have to blow-dry or iron your hair, make sure your tresses are coated with leave-on conditioner first.

Red hair is beautiful hair. Rather than scorning the brightness of your titian locks, you should embrace it. Celebrate your ginger hair by caring for it the way it needs to be cared for all the time.

How Elizabeth I made red hair fashionable – in 1558

There’s a painting in the National Portrait Gallery that has long been a source of fashion inspiration for me; it dates from about 1575, and is a peerless image of redheaded chic. Elizabeth I wears a gown of white and gold satin with dashing scarlet frogging across the breast, like a hussar, and she holds a particularly wonderful feather fan – whites and sulphurous yellows, dark iridescent greens, oranges and russet reds. That ghostly face is turned three-quarters of the way toward us; her expression reserved; her lips compressed. The line of that nose – “rising somewhat in the midst”, as Sir John Hayward described it – is clearly shown. My nose does the same. My hair is also red. Elizabeth I has been my pin-up girl since I was tiny. But it was only when I began researching my book Red: A Natural History of the Redhead that I came to appreciate how revolutionary Elizabeth’s image-making truly was.

Elizabeth’s red hair was no accident. For most of her life, Elizabeth wore wigs, so she might have chosen hair of any colour she liked, but she chose red; she was so committed to the shade that she is even supposed to have dyed the tails of her horses to match. (Who says redheads don’t have a sense of humour?)

Nor was she following the crowd – far from it. The astonishing thing is that Elizabeth chose a hair colour that had typified the barbarian for centuries, since the time of the ancient Greeks and their encounters with the tribes living around the Black Sea. Its predisposition, as a recessive gene, of cropping up in the endogamous Orthodox Jewish community led to it becoming the hair colour chosen in much European art for the arch-traitor, Judas, too. No surprise, therefore, that it was also used to stigmatise Tudor England’s own barbarian and potentially traitorous “other” – the Irish and the Scots. So powerful a piece of conditioning was this that in Elizabethan literature you find red hair cited as positive proof that the clans of Ireland and Scotland (along with any other untrustworthy Johnny Foreigner you might care to include), were directly descended from the “barbarous Scythians”, a tribe living around the Black Sea 3,000 years ago, mentioned in King Lear.

It seems strange for a monarch to link herself visually with the very subjects who had most to gain should she lose her throne. But there were personal reasons behind Elizabeth’s choice. Displaying the red hair inherited from her father gave the lie to all those rumours of illegitimacy that had plagued her girlhood. There were public and political reasons too.

Red hair has always been other. It stands apart. The white skin that so often goes with it also spoke in Elizabeth’s image-making of her separateness, her status as the Virgin Queen. Red and white were also the colours of St George, England’s patron saint. Those courtiers who dyed their hair or their beards red, to follow Elizabeth’s lead, were not merely declaring their loyalty to the queen; they and she were also, I believe, making a statement of standing apart, in Protestant England, from dark-haired and less pale-skinned Catholic Europe. Red and white were the Elizabethan brand, if you like, and that brand has been one of the most successful in history, as recognisable now as it would have been in Elizabeth’s own day.

This taking of a stereotype and turning it on its head, this classic piece of reverse discrimination, strikes me as startlingly modern, and mirrors the way many redheads are dispatching prejudice today. Gloriana was a superbly clever propagandist without question, but perhaps you have to be a redhead to appreciate what a perfect piece of sleight-of-hand her image-making truly was.