The six steps to getting celebrity hair... or not.

Hair crushes. Not a hard concept to understand, they go something like this:

1. See fabulous celebrity hair

2. Take picture to hairdresser

3. See hair on floor of hairdresser

4. Look up and realise your face is not the same as said celebrity

5. Leave hairdresser slightly depressed

6. A few months later find a new celebrity hairstyle you want to copy. Repeat steps 1 to 5.

To avoid this cyclical hair disappointment, Jayne Wild, the 2011 Hairdresser of the Year from Wild Life Hair has a tip. A really easy tip. Place your thumb over the face of the celebrity – see, told you it was easy. If you still like the hair after that, then go for it. If you come to the realisation that the hairstyle is average, then it is probably because you want the face/body/life of the celebrity rather than their actual haircut.

“Years ago everyone was asking for Cindy Crawford’s hair, which at the time, was just straight and long. So I’d place my thumb over her face and ask clients if they still wanted her hair,” Wild says.

The answer as you would expect was overwhelmingly, a no. Wild also says a good hairdresser will adapt a hair crush to suit your face shape, lifestyle and how much time you want to spend doing your hair into consideration. So I guess a haircut that will make us look like a supermodel and also magically fall into place straight out of bed isn’t a reality after all? Dammit.

“Right now model Frehja Beha Erickson’s 70’s shag is very popular, along with Alexa Chung’s versatile chop. Emma Watson and Michelle William’s pixie cuts are still popular with very short styles. And my older clients are asking for Helen Mirren’s wavy soft style and Judy Dench’s short crop,” Wild says.

Let’s for a moment remember the hair crushes we’ve had. I’ll run you through some of mine and then leave yours in the comments. A trip down bad hair lane, if you will.

My first hair crush can be traced back to Punky Brewster, not only was she allowed to have a rainbow mural painted on her bedroom wall she also had the best yellow sun-shaped hair baubles. I was six and plaits and ponytails was where it was at.

Then came the crimper. It was 1989 and I admired anyone with boofy zig zag hair. More than anything I wanted enough hair to pile out the top of a straw hat, a la Mel & Kim. (For anyone not alive in the 80’s, Mel & Kim were twin pop stars who cut the tops off hats and… oh nevermind, I guess you had to be there).

My next notable hair crush was Gwyneth Paltrow in ‘Sliding Doors’. I had just turned 18, had been through my first break-up and lopping off my long hair was just the thing I thought I needed. It soon became addictive, the shorter my hair became, the more liberated I felt. It was pretty much a military buzz cut by the end, and when a toothless lesbian propositioned me in a bar, I thought it was probably time to start growing it again.

Next up came the ‘Rachel’ cut, like most women over the age of 30, I too had Jennifer Aniston’s hair from the sitcom Friends. The choppy layered look became one of the most copied hairstyles of the 90’s, every woman over the age of 28 will remember this hair phenomenon.

Other hair crushes I’ve had over the years include; a shaved head like Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, Tank Girl’s dreadlocks (I wasn’t brave enough to go through with either of these), Meg Ryan’s messy bob and more recently Elle MacPherson’s beachy waves. No matter how old I get, I think I’ll always harbor a secret desire to have pink hair and a thick fringe, not that either would suit me. But that isn’t really the point of hair crushes, is it?

Who were some of your favourite hair crushes? And whose hair do you want now?