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Courtney Smith on Millie Mackintosh’s feel-good swimwear collection
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Image / Beauty

This Colour-Changing Hair Dye Is Perfect For You If You Have Commitment Issues


By Niamh ODonoghue
27th Feb 2017

Photography Sya Groosman, Hair Kieran Tudor

This Colour-Changing Hair Dye Is Perfect For You If You Have Commitment Issues

Looking for a colour change this month, but torn between two looks? Why not have both.


Finally, our hair dreams have been answered by the hair Gods who have gifted us with a magical concoction dye that changes colour depending on the temperature. It’s like a mood ring, but for your head.

The mesmerising witchcraft is the work of creative and data visualisation scientist?Lauren Bowker?? who uses fashion to help dictate trends in science to communicate her quirky ideas. ‘The Unseen‘ is Bowker’s experiment-drive and creative space where she and her team bring her ideas to life by “using chemistry alongside design to develop simple visual solutions applicable to everyday complicated and invisible problems, visualising data by using the primal language of colour change”.

The chemists’ latest sorcery, aptly titled FIRE, is a hair dye that changes colour as the temperature rises and falls, and the result is a mesmerising, and came about by what Bowker calls “messing in the lab”. As well as colour changing, Bowker is also working on technology that changes the physical structure of the hair so that when light hits it will change from, say, red to blue.

Mystifying, right? And judging by this recent interview with Dazed, Bowker is not only a full-time chemist, but a witch: “I have always been into the occults and into mixing stuff,” she says. “Even as a kid I used to mix bath potions, and was really hands-on with the stuff I had around me, making new products out of them, without even knowing I was doing it.”

As well as changing hair dye, her impressive repertoire of bizarre and beautiful experiments include a headpiece for Swarovski with gemstones that change colour in response to brain activity, a jacket that responds to air pollution.?

Unfortunately, we won’t be finding these special hair dyes in our favourite salons as it’s only in the testing stages; although several models got to try it out during this month’s London Fashion Week Festival. But Bowker?will continue to combine tech and science ?and push beyond our boundaries and limitations. All in the name of fashion and witchcraft, of course: “technology like Apple, Google, yes they are technology, but for me, technology should be magic and shouldn’t be engineered all the time. To me, chemistry and science is witchcraft – and so it should be.”

Follow Lauren and her team at The Unseen here.