Our Colour
Couture Colouring
Hair colouring is the beating heart of Secret Garden. With years of creating, maintaining and correcting hair colours for the hair types and natural hair colours from the entire spectrum, Secret Garden director Eiki has earned an array of covetable experience in his profile: the official international artistic team of Aveda, collaboration with colour technicians across the world, and consulting and colouring hair of models and actresses for shows, photo shoots, films and TVs in the UK, US and Asia. With an unwavering passion for colour the London colourist brings his colouring flair and artistry into play. We paint Tokyo with resolve: keep our clients' hair on top of their game.
Our in-depth consultation unites our expertise and the capability of understanding the results you look for. A consultation is held at the beginning of every appointment where we carve out time for both of us to discuss your colour. We assess your hair and listen to your thoughts, preferences, expectation, maintenance routine, and any concerns you may have. We will further communicate the key components such as how we achieve the result and how the outcome will look and work with your hair and style, as well as considering the aspects of your home care and future colour continuation. Please bring reference images or photos if you have ideas you like. Our experts will think out your ideas and share thoughts on how well the idea will be adapted for and succeed in your hair, skin and everyday style. If you don't have a specific visual idea but just want to make some changes or seek our professional advice for the colour suitable for you, we are open for discussing and proposing ideas in the easiest way that you can understand, compare and estimate. We would like you to have demystified, informed consultation in a comfortable and relaxed atmosphere.
Design Elements
Our own unique, original principle of colour design is composed of these four key elements:
- Personal tone
- Hairstyle
- Hair texture
- Hair condition.
The personal tone concerns your natural hair colour, current hair colour, skin tones and eye colour as the primary tones, and your make-up and wardrobe as the secondary tones. Colour contrasts between skin, eyes, brows, lips and hair, women naturally have greater facial contrast than men and these tones can all make a difference to a stunning hair colour, as well as the hair colour itself has an effect on these assets by the same token.
The hairstyle is your haircut, hair length, stylings and the ways that how the hair is usually worn, while hair texture means your hair's natural texture: fine to coarse, straight to tight curl and resilient to fragile. For example, highlights perform differently on a layered cut and a one-length gut. One set of highlights appears differently on straight and curly texture. Long and short lengths offer different opportunities for highlights and balayages. Fine hair and coarse hair lift their colour differently and therefore they are treated with adjusted chemical strengths in our texture sensitive approach. Connecting hair colour with the hair's style+texture is an essential part of successful colour results. Why one person's blonde hair colour win many compliments while the same blonde shade on another person receives a poor press? Why one person's caramel on soft tendrils glow heavenly when the exact same colour absorbs light instead of shining back on a similar hairstyle of someone else's? What canvas the colour is on and how it will later be worn are all important as much as the choice of colour and it's application. We will ensure to find the finest balance between your natural hair, your hairstyle and the achieved colour in context for the ultimate result.
Your hair condition is assessed by porosity and elasticity on various parts of your hair, and different zones in the length. We often colour the length of hair (roots-middles-ends) in different manners and products (the International Zone System). We will make sure to take account of your previous colour histories, chemical histories i.e. lightening/darkening, straightening, keratin treatments etc, with your regular styling and maintenance routines i.e. blow-dries and heat application, which can affect the colour and hair condition after you introduce a new colour. In some cases with compromised hair conditions, certain types of colour might not be available, and for these cases we are able to provide a wealth of plans for alternative, but equally admirable design solutions and future strategies. Hair's health and shine are paramount at Secret Garden and this is the central tenet that supports our creative work.
Care Colouring
Eiki feels thankful that he worked at an international company and gained education, training and understanding of product range, product performance/compatibility with hair colours/textures, and customer care. In the global hair colour market, there are international standards for the types of colour products and colour charts. Our colour system is firmly based on the international standards and we follow the international methodology and guidances when we choose our colour products, communicate the colour and devise our technical processes.
We have a vast selection of professional products to work with in order to maximise your look with absolute creativity and utmost protection. Our colour products are selected and sourced from established brands worldwide and we promise to keep our products the latest in technology and have premium quality. The selection of our colour products is based on their performance for the variety of international hair types and colour shades. Our 100% international clientele enables us to make this specialist focus which allows us to perform the safest colour work every day. We would also like to mention that we regularly test new products and techniques to make sure we keep abreast of the latest developments and ideas. Along the modern colour products applied with our expert techniques, we strive to safeguard the integrity of your hair quality with effective care schemes such as post-colour care and conditioning items. We see colouring hair as a journey and it is our responsibility to navigate you on a safe journey.
We have product lines of ammonia-free, PPD-free and non-oxidative acidic colours. If you have concerns over chemical or allergic reactions, we are always happy to cater for your specific requirements. Henna colours are not available with us for the time being because of their highly metallic content - modern hennas today are not without chemical components unlike the old-fashioned hennas - that can impact other chemicals, and their shade ranges are less versatile to work with most of contemporary colour products. We also do not stock hair manicures, which are popular in some Asian countries but like henna, they have their own disadvantages and run risks of difficulty afterwards.
Our techniques for colour
Colouring hair is a great way of enhancing your natural hair colour and adding variation to your style. Even adding a touch of colour to your hair, wether it's permanent or semi-permanent, it will perk up your hair and bring an instant sheen without changing the length or style of the hair. On fine hair, we find that adding colour can increase volume by filling up the hair shaft and enhancing the grain of hair texture. Thick textures can also be benefited from having an additional colour for improved condition and restored lustre brought by the deposited pigments. A multi-dimensional colour can work its magic by infusing maximum body and depth into an otherwise monotonous or depth-lacking hair texture where our tried and tested formulae of graduating and/or contrasting shades are mixed in and strategically applied to the fine strands of hair.
Our semi-permanent colour can fade away beautifully after certain numbers of washes, so there's no commitment for you to regrowth or demarkations with this type of colour. Demi-permanent colour is something between semi and permanent, which has a firmer grip with the hair than semi but less firm than permanent. We frequently combine permanent colour and semi/demi-permanent colour for the different requirements of the varied growth zones in the hair length.
Highlights and balayages have been our house signature soon after our opening in 2014. A hint of highlights bring sun-kissed lights and soft, arresting texture to your hair by lifting the colour of fine amounts of strands of your hair. Harmony of blending lights and fine transitions of depth and lightness from these lightening techniques brighten the skin complexion and enhance hair's light reflection. For both darker and lighter natural hair, hues of highlights can be introduced with a few notches lighter than your base for a subtle result, or with appreciable lifting levels from your base colour for a clear lightening effect. We have a selection of lightening products suitable for all types of foil work from bleaches to high-lifts. The key points for deciding the colour product is your natural hair colour and the level of colour lifts required for your finished result. In every possible way, we will avoid unnecessary chemical stress applied to your hair and the targeted shade will be achieved with minimum lifts. The techniques frequently used for our flawless highlights/balayage are highlighting/lowlighting from fine classic packets, baby lights (i.e. super fine highlights), fine slices, backcombing, fine balayage, balayage with foils, visible chunky highlights, bold statement patterns, etc. Often these lightening techniques are combined with other applications such as tinting, demi-permanent, permanent, etc to form one integral colour style. Our classic balayage and modern balayage are used to blend sweeps of lighter shades in your hair or to correct unnecessary tones. Modern highlighting and balayaging techniques are too good to be kept only for blonde shades and they are used for all base colours at our salon. In doing so, we just want to keep them at the right shades in the right places.
Bleach/Lightener
Bleach, as known as Lightener, has been one of our strongest colour applications in our technical repertoire. As we established ourselves as blonde specialists, the soft blonde, the archetype of light blondes we produce has become our trademark. Experience and passion, two magic ingredients mixed in together, we make our lightener work safe for the colour and gentle for your hair and scalp.
Our global(=full-length) bleaching is conducted with our technical excellence and high-quality products. Customised product choices are made for your hair based on the chemical potency needed for the lightened level you'd like to see and the suitability for your hair texture. Our technical focuses are:
- Precision for minimum overlapping and slice work
- Scalp protection and hairline protection
- Protection for the small hairs on your hairlines
- Gentle heat work with the use of low-heat for the even results in the case warming-up is needed for lightener activation
- Optimised zonal work for the length applications for virgin hair and for the hair with complications from previous history. Slid application timing for the roots, mids and ends is used because the farther the hair from the scalp, the less open to being acted upon the contact with chemicals. We may incorporate adjusted product strength as well.
- Effective lifting. We do not bleach the same area of hair twice or three times to achieve the desired shade unless for the complicated cases that needed to be worked in such manners. At the same time we do not leave unwanted warm tones like oranges or yellows in your strands as well as avoiding over-lifting.
Beyond all the above aspects of bleach work, our strongest selling point is probably the consultation and planning. Before you entering the lifestyle of a peroxide blonde, an in-depth discussion will be offered; we determine the look you're after and analyse how best it can be achieved. We evaluate all the technical options including this single-process bleaching along with highlighting, balayaging and hi-lifting for the most suitable approaches for your desired look. The following aspects are considered:
- The lifting levels from your current hair to the finished hair
- Compatibility of these applications with your hair texture and condition
- The colouring attributes brought by these applications for achieving the finial result
- Maintenance of the desired look in light of your hair condition, hair density, hair length and lifestyle
The purpose of this consultation is to make sure that you make the best choice for the image you picture. A single-process bleach is a direct and very effective method for achieving light shades, but it's not the only way of creating blonde shades and it has to forfeit some properties that would otherwise have been retained. For example in our salon, more blonde looks are created with off-scalp applications (i.e. highlights, balayage) and muted lifting techniques such as high-lifts than with on-scalp applications of single-process bleach. We discern the looks of hair colour and how they are created. In the opposite case, if you already have your hair processed with global applications and you're considering alternative light-shade styles, we have numerous solutions on hand. When you see and tell us about your hair ideas, we are able to have all options on our table and explore and talk you through about what method brings what results, their merits/demerits, all put into perspective around your hair in the way that you can envisage easily.
Grey hair
Grey hair opens up wider options for the colour palette of your hair. There are more than just one shade of grey hair in one person's hair, in addition to individually unique patterns of grey concentration and distribution. With our single process tint, we meticulously colour greys with beautiful permanent shades with reliable, sound coverage and smooth colour continuation without complicating the task. The simplicity of the work and the results of our single-process tint are not created with a quick mix of one colour and one peroxide. There are almost always more than two colours, sometimes four or more, that are blended together with gradient strengths of activators for one person's single tint formula for the perfect match with your hair and skin tone. We have empirically learned that it is worth spending the extra mile of thoughts and details to create the best mix that can produce an exquisite result of hair that grows out in a most natural fashion. Adding hand-painted golden highlights on the length of hair after root tinting with a deep/medium and natural/warm shade can bring a delightful effect that can complement all complexions.
For first-time grey colouring, we can recommend some gentle approaches by using semi or demi-permanent colours that can just cover or blend the greys and leave minimum impacts on the non-greys nearby. These forgiving formulae are sometimes just right for those baby greys that try to draw your attention. This is the job that calls for a light touch and the delicate control of the tone and chemical potencies of the tint, and we take it very seriously. You might be good at spotting those faint sheer strands bobbing up and down over the surfacer of your hair, but we're also good at seeing your hair in a bigger picture and doing just what it's needed.
If your hair is grey with red hair, we bespoke the simple root tinting with your favourite red tones mixed in the grey covering formula and glossing the rest of the length with natural continuation. Popular tones such as mahogany, auburn, titian and cinnamon are all available. We can carefully balance our product mixture for the colour composition of your hair: grey ratio, grey concentration, the contrast between the grey zone and non-grey zone, product opacity, and the tonal harmony of the length are taken into account. Red hair also needs gentle handling and our specialist knowledge in red shades and custom-made mild formulae will cover your grey mildly yet without leaving translucent, see-through red strands from ineffectual coverage. Our safe formula for the base will create a subdued, perfect foundation without hotness, from which your hair can grow out to the healthy length of red shades. As you continue colouring grey roots of your hair, we are able to offer many ways to maintain red shades on the length for vibrant, splendid results.
For greys in light shades, in order to maintain healthy shades of shimmering blonde we can weave in subtle tones of well-placed highlights for an extra dimension. This will prevent greys from looking conspicuous or too cold in tone and the practice will blend the reflective, natural tones of the lightened pieces into the existing blonde shades in good continuity. Another popular service from our menu is to vanish the grey by using a single process colour in a way it lightens the dark hair and colours the grey at the same time. We make sure that our colour does it without making brassiness. Like all the previously mentioned grey approaches, both highlights and high-lifts, our colour for grey in light shades is calibrated at a gram level and customised for your grey/non-grey balance, hair density, tonality and the shades you prefer in order to complete the most natural look.
For those who would like to maintain hues of beautiful grey hair, we are able to provide a good selection of technical choices for the exceptional results with laid-back savoir faire. There are many inspiring grey ideas that can be adapted to various hair length and textures. The key aspects are warmth and coolness in the natural colour of grey/non-grey hair, the pattern of grey distribution, the ratio of grey within the entirety of your hair, and your hair's style+texture. Our creative repertoire of toning, low-lighting, and advanced highlighting are used to infuse superb cool shine in your hair colour. Confusingly, the grey styles we see on media outlets today, despite being passed off as natural, are often not the ones that are simply left uncoloured. There is confusion among many including hairdressers. If you are considering transitioning from covering grey to growing grey, our experts will provide you with accurate analyses of what you look for and talk you through how the look can be achieved and maintained. There are different answers for everyone and not everything is so black and white but we are here for you and make your nuisance a thing of the past.
As you look after your coloured hair at home, greys are often drier and wirier than the non-greys. They tend to be resilient and can be a bit harder to be as effectively styled as other non-greys in your hair. Hairstyles with grey hair call for a moisturising or colour-friendly shampoo and conditioner to maintain its elasticity, and regular deep conditioning to keep the hair moisturised and nourished. Our experts can assist you for the ritual for healthy, luxurious hair.