Kelly O’Brien Centretown News
Ilona Garson serves a client in her salon.Centretown hairstylist Ilona Garson is shearing-up to compete in Berlin on Nov. 22 at an international hairstyling competition.
Garson, owner of Jet Black Hair and Studio on MacLaren Street, says getting to compete in Wella’s International Trend Vision Awards didn’t happen overnight since she’s been dye-ing to get to this point for the past nine years.
Garson says every year Wella picks a trend and it’s up to stylists to submit a photo of a look they created based on the trend.
On competition day, she says, stylists have four hours to recreate the hairstyle in the photo they submitted live in front of judges.
“The style that I chose, cut and everything, is really edgy and it’s on-trend,” she says of her creation, which features blunt bangs and subtle pink and blue tinting.
Garson qualified for the global event after making top seven in Canada, then placing first in the North American Trend Vision Awards in Las Vegas this summer.
Wella, the hair products company that hosts the event, has three categories that stylists compete in – Young Talent, Student and Colour Vision. Garson will compete in the colour category.
The stylist says she’s preparing for the two-day event the same way she has for other competitions.
That means “practising on doll heads or practising the styling on my model and just making sure that I have all my colour formulas down pat.”
Garson says she plans to set herself apart from other competitors by focusing on her own work of art and not what other stylists are doing.
She says her secret to making it this far was going into the national-level competition with a calm and confident mindset.
“Because I’d made it to the national level before, I knew what I needed to do to prepare myself for nationals so that I could go in fully prepared,” she says. “My other fellow competitors went in not as prepared as me. So you could see that some of them were panicking and getting a little bit flustered.”
David Cole, owner of Ottawa’s David Cole Hair Design, has also competed in international hairstyling competitions.
Cole won first place at the Organisation Mondiale Coiffure European Cup in 1999. Two years ago, he retired from being an international judge for the last 10 years to focus on his clients in Ottawa.
Cole says he expects Garson will face tough competition in Europe.