It’s been eight years since the last Matrix Destination, but this one, which was held in Orlando January 23-25 and featured a special appearance by High School Musical’s Ashley Tisdale and industry icons like Tabatha Coffey and George Papanikolas, was worth the wait.
The three-day educational event—Matrix Artistic Director Nicholas French called it “edu-tainment,” and he’d be right—featured a stellar opening night presentation in four segments that showcased the work of the crème de la crème of the beauty biz, including Nick French, Daniel Roldan, Crystofer Benson, Nick Stenson and dozens more.
The next morning, the auditorium was packed as Tabatha Coffey and Matrix celebrity stylist George Papanikolas kicked things off with a lively review of current red-carpet-worthy looks. Later, Coffey presented an interactive program for salon owners looking to reenergize their businesses. Classes in progressive haircutting (Daniel Roldan, Paul Falltrick and Tarra Dean), the fundamentals of avant-garde work (Michael Albor and Cori Randall) and trends in cutting, coloring and styling (Nick French and Dan Csicsai) rotated throughout the day with Men’s Street Style.
Todd Kane, Tara Koenig and Marcus Shamin presented an exciting collection of looks executed with shears and clippers. As was to be expected, hair color was a big part of Destination with classes like Kaleidoscope (Nick Stenson, Danielle Keasling and Lenny Strand challenged attendees to see color in 3D) and Color Outside the Lines (Leah Sterk, Steve Waldman and Robert Santana) tackled color correction.
“Just about every client who walks through your door is in need of color correction,” says Sterk, who offered solutions for safely removing direct dyes from the hair (it’s not as easy as you think). There was so much to see and learn at Destination that we plan on sharing it with you throughout the coming months in the pages of American Salon.
Photo Credit: Pete Nguyen for American Salon
About: Matrix, a leading professional haircare and haircolor company in the United States, is part of L'Oreal USA's Professional Products Division. Founded in 1980, MATRIX is committed to the development of the salon professional and offers a wide range of products including: Biolage, Biolage ExquisiteOil, Biolage Advanced, COLORINSIDER, ColorSync, Design Pulse, Logics, SOCOLOR, Total Results, and Vavoom. For more information visit Matrix.com.