Everything starts with an idea. Back in the eighties, George Mennella began a group of creative experiments. An avid underwater photographer, a scuba diver, a hair stylist, a traveler, and a collector of arts and ideas, George had the notion of creating a standing lampshade. The hair industry was full of experiments in hairdressing…hair resembling hats, baskets, and other sundry items. The Lampshade Girl began to take shape. George found a tall leggy model, gave her blond highlights, cut the top off a hat and stuck it on her head, pulling her hair through the middle so that she looked like a human lampshade. A body stocking, a wire, and a lamp chain attached to her ear completed the picture…a standing lamp. Cutting her hair evenly around so that it draped past the rim, George illuminated the hair with light and took pictures to record the gleaming colors. A series of photographs documented the effects and took root in his imagination. Like the Salvador Dali painting of human furniture, the dream had begun.
Color and light, interacting with each other…George had an epiphany. A few weeks later, he made prototypes out of oaktag, and began experimenting with hair color, painting it on models adorning their cardboard hats. The concept worked. But the eighties was a time when multi-coloration and tonality was not popular. The foil technique had not yet reached its pinnacle. Breaking out the Palette would have made the process a novelty rather than a breakthrough, and George decided to wait, experimenting privately with mannequins and models, never in the public realm. But he knew the formula worked.
Over the years, during the eighties and the nineties, George began learning the technique of dry cutting hair. Around the same time, he began a series of underwater photographs, using his niece and a model, giving them waterproof makeup, sitting a styling chair at the bottom of his swimming pool with the model seated. The hair took on a certain celestial look, with his niece holding out a hair dryer, blowing locks of floating hair. George hung the group of photographs on the salon walls.
Years passed, but the idea of horizontal geometric planes on a human lampshade or a mermaid in a pool began to gel in George’s imagination. The science of dry-cutting married to the science of coloring on geometric planes eventually became the Geo Palette Hair System, the first process to fuse coloring and cutting at one time. The Palette was born.
