Once winter comes, we’re over mermaid hair almost instantly. The second the temperature drops, give us chic, blunt lobs paired with leather jackets and texture that’s half bedhead, half model-off-duty. There’s only one man for the job: stylist Anh Co Tran, L’Oréal Professionnel ambassador and architect of the lived-in hair look.
We were lucky enough to sit in on a recent appointment of Tran’s and watched him take ordinary balayage hair to the next level with an effortless lob haircut transformation.
When it came to cutting Celina’s gorgeous hair, Tran’s number one focus was the sheer amount of it.
“She'll be getting a bob a little bit on the longer side but it's going to be off the shoulder. And it's gonna have movement, because she has a lot of hair. It's really thick,” he explains. “I'll call it like a soft blend, so it appears to be somewhat blunt but has internal movement.”
When layering thick hair, sometimes less is more! Tran warns that too many choppy layers can give hair that’s already big a “bulbous” look, so he prefers to cut layers inside the hair for a sense of movement without any extra volume.
Another thing you might notice about the way Tran cuts? His clients always have dry hair. This technique is designed to make it easier for Tran to highlight the way the hair actually falls—not what it looks like wet.
“I just want to make sure that it's nice and straight, but not flat,” he says. “When I do flat iron I'm not pulling [the hair] down, I'm pulling up, because it's very important to keep the bounce and the cushion. When it's all flat, then when you put layers in you can't really see it.”
The last element of Celina’s cut that makes all the difference in any lob is, of course, the length. While she typically chooses to hang onto her inches, Tran favors a cut right above the shoulders for more impact. Once your hair is free of your shoulders, you don’t have to worry about it flipping and can maintain that beachy, on-trend texture.
Still, Tran lets his clients hang onto extra length right around the face just to make them feel more comfortable with their new ‘do.
“A lot of times if they get scared of like, 'I want to go bob but I don't want to, I'm afraid my face would be so big,' then I make the front a little longer,” he explains.
For Tran, the most important part is that his client leaves with a lob that really fits them. That’s why he often asks his clients to wear a smock instead of the traditional salon robe that clasps tightly at the neck—seeing the neck is all-important!
“Seeing the neck is very important because if I do this and I cut like that, I just see a floating head. So when I open this up, I can see her neck, I see her torso. It's very important to have proportion to it.”
When it comes time to style your new lob, follow Tran’s advice for perfect piece-y ends: After curling, mist your strands with L’Oréal Professionnel’s Tecni.Art Next Day Hair, exclusively available online at Hair.com, for texture and follow with the brand’s Siren Waves for weight. Just like that, total transformation complete!
To book a lob transformation of your own, use our salon locator to book an appointment with a stylist near you.
