A lot of you may know Amerie from her hit single One Thing. I got to know her really well recently, when I worked on her video for the title track for Touch, her latest CD.
Ruth Roche |
The shoot went on for 22 hours and was shot in LA, both in a nightclub and on a jungle set created in a parking lot the day of the shoot. I worked with makeup artist Eric Spearman, and we started getting her ready at 3 A.M. What a day!
To create this messy bed-head, I set Amerie's hair with a large barrel iron and back-combed it at the roots, mostly in the crown. As she played with her hair in the scene, it became perfectly tousled and appropriately "wrecked." |
In all, we created three different looks for Amerie. Because she dances—and I mean, really dances—during almost every scene, her hair had to be able to move and still look great. So we kept the products, especially hairspray, to a minimum. We also had to retouch her hair with an iron throughout the day; not only was she whipping it around in the dance segments, it also kept raining on and off.
This futuristic Japanese-inspired look is elegant and sexy. I pulled her hair back smooth and sleek into two ponytails, one at the crown and one at the nape, leaving out a top Mohawk section to smooth back and over the crown. Using elastics, I created "bubbles" down the length of the ponytails, pinned them into place and intertwined a thicker braid within them. |
But when all was said and done, despite the incredibly long hours, everything worked out perfectly. Amerie looked gorgeous, and I'm sure a great video will come out of it. Following are the techniques I used to create the different looks.
Amerie described this as "mermaid waves"—long and layered, but without a lot of volume. I center-parted the hair and wrapped it around the iron from roots to ends. This keeps the hair flatter and wavier, rather than producing bouncy curls. |
E-mail Ruth at [email protected]. To find out more about RARE education with Ruth Roche, visit www.rarenyc.com, or call (866) RARE-NYC.