Interview | Christophe Robin

The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify. 

The Supermodel Era defined the early 1990s, with famed photographer Peter Lindbergh responsible for creating now iconic images of then household names- Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, Elle Macpherson and Stephanie Seymour.

The man responsible for maintaining and colouring their tresses? Iconic hair colourist Christophe Robin.

Despite growing up in the French countryside, a place Christophe describes as “the middle of nowhere,” Christophe Robin knew as a child that beauty, and more specifically hair, was an industry within which he belonged.

“It’s funny, because I was not surrounded by beauty at all,” Christophe tells me. “I grew up on a farm, a little village of 160 people. My parents were farmers. Women who worked on a farm did not take too much care of themselves- except on Sundays, because you had to drive 60 kilometres, which would be 40 miles, to go to the hair salon. It was not very accessible for the ladies or the girls who worked on farms. They used to meet on Sundays, all the girlfriends, and they used to colour their hair and cut their hair, and as a child it was funny to see the transformation. That was my first beauty memory, and I always said to myself ‘That’s what I want to do.’ I wanted to help women feel good and to look happy and beautiful.”

Christophe didn’t stray from his early ambition, securing his first apprenticeship at a hair salon in Bar-Sur-Aube, a city in the Champagne area, before he had even turned 15 years old. At a time when most colourists approached hair with techniques that Christophe describes as “secure, fast and economic,” it was under the tutelage of Dominique, the salon manager who had been colouring hair since the 1960s, who instilled an ethos within Christophe that he still holds with him today. “The products were very aggressive at the time,” Christophe explains. “She [Dominique] told me ‘If you want to have a beautiful result, you have to take good care of the hair.’ She really trained me to have an artisan point of view.” With that in mind, Christophe crafted his own way of colouring with an emphasis on caring for the hair before, during and after colouring it.

It was Dominique, too, who encouraged Christophe to pursue colouring, rather than specialising in cutting and styling the hair. “Become a good hair colourist,” Dominique had told him. “Your clients will be much more loyal than if you were a good stylist.”

“After my time as an apprentice, I left and I went into Troyes, a bigger city,” Christophe tells me of his swift career trajectory. “When I arrived in Troyes I worked for Jean-Louis David, which was a big chain. The trainers of Jean-Louis David came to the salon, and they said ‘Don’t waste your time here. Come with us and work as a trainer in Paris at the Jean-Louis David training centre.'”

At just 17, Christophe packed his bags and set himself up in Paris. “I lied. I said I was 18, and I didn’t give my papers for four months. I arrived in Paris right away and lied about my age for the first four or five months. Jean-Louis David had the best studio team at the time, and it was the beginning of the top model era.”

Christophe credits both luck and timing with much of his early success. “At the time, hair colour was not trendy at all,” he tells me of the earliest years of his career. “It was before the age of the top model. Hair colour was just to cover a few greys or to make you blonde, but it was not something trendy.” Christophe’s arrival in Paris coincidentally heralded the beginning of the Supermodel Era, and a chance encounter during this period is what launched the young colourist into the celebrity stratosphere. “One of [the Jean-Louis David trainers], Bruce, asked me to come and help him on a commercial for L’Oréal with Stephanie Seymour. Stephanie did not want to colour her hair at all. She was scared. She was forced to do it anyway. She did it, and she loved it. It was like a snowball, because right away she gave my name to Elle McPherson, and within six months I was looking after all the top models. At the time, it was a joy because the supermodels were the big stars on the covers of every magazine. They pushed the actresses off to the side- they were very jealous!”

“I’m lucky because I worked with the biggest right away- the biggest photographers, like Peter Lindbergh, the biggest makeup artists like Linda Cantello, and it’s always the same- the bigger they are, the nicer they are. They helped me, the little country boy that I was.”

To this day, Christophe allows many of those early lessons to guide his work. “I remember conversations with Linda Cantello. She would say ‘Don’t be too technical!’ because, in terms of highlights, if you do them every one centimetre you’re going to lose the contrast. You have to break your techniques. It’s like with music. You have to have a good basis, like in jazz, to be able to do crazy things.”

In 1995, at age 24, Christophe opened his own salon in Paris- a salon dedicated to colouring. “Hair colour was always an accessory within a hair salon- hidden underground or in bad light. I didn’t believe in that. I used to do the colour at home, very late at night or on Sundays, so I thought it was time to have my own, proper space to do it.”

While the salon experienced early success thanks to Christophe’s already established supermodel clientele including Linda Evangelista and Claudia Schiffer, and actresses such as Vanessa Paradis, Kristin Scott Thomas, it was when French actress Catherine Deneuve floated through the salon doors that life truly began to change for Christophe. “Catherine Deneuve is the queen of France,” Christophe tells me. “One night she had dinner with Claudia Schiffer, and Catherine went to Claudia and said ‘I have problems with my blonde- where do you go? Your blonde is beautiful!’ And Claudia said ‘Go to Christophe Robin.’ Once Catherine Deneuve came, all of the other actresses came.”

What was it, specifically, about Christophe’s work that made him such a go-to for the rich and famous? “Caring, I believe,” answers Christophe. “If a girl comes in and says ‘I want to be platinum,’ there’s going to be a lot of conversation about that- ‘Will you look good? Do you know how it’s going to affect the quality of your hair? It’s bad for your scalp, and when you want to go back to your natural colour you’re going to suffer for six months.’ There’s a real conversation there, and I’ll never lie to them. I always tell them how it is. I believe that because I care so much for the quality of the hair, I don’t do stupid things. Even for celebrities, for a movie, I’ll tell them what’s going to happen. I try to be very honest.”

That care for the quality of the hair is precisely why Christophe has moved steadily away from the global Fashion Week sphere. “Fashion Week- I can’t take it any more!” laughs Christophe. “I did it for 30 years and used to work with Yves Saint Laurent. One year, for Couture [Fashion Week], we decided to have all the girls in crazy colours. I have lovely memories of that. Recently though, there are some designers who say ‘I want fried hair.’ So you have these poor girls who arrive from Croatia, Russia, Ukraine, they don’t speak English and have never had their hair coloured, and then you have to bleach them and fry it. I say to the designers ‘I can’t fry it,’ and they say ‘No no no, fry them!’ You have these girls crying, and I just can’t do that.”

“Fashion today… I don’t want to sound old, but you have a few like Jacquemus who are cool and who respect women and want to bring something beautiful out in them. But when it’s just an image thing, I can’t take it any more. I have a chance to say ‘No’ now. To say ‘I don’t like this.’ There are people I still love to work for. John Galliano for Maison Margiela, Alber Elbaz, they are still people who I work for and adore. I must rather work for singers who have a message to express, or actors in movies, but fashion? I’m fed up with fashion. It’s not an industry I like any more.”

There are a few exceptions to the rule, with Christophe still thrilled to play a role in carefully considered, yet still extreme, hair transformations. “Tilda Swinton is always fun to work with. Her skin and her eyes adapt to everything, so we’ve done every kind of colour. Natasha Poly, when she went from blonde to black for Givenchy. Laetitia Casta when she went blonde to play Brigette Bardot.”

Christophe’s ethos remains the same as it did as an apprentice- that truly beautiful colouring requires caring for the hair before, during and after applying the colour. Frustrated by a lack of nourishing, botanical products on the market, Christophe began to create products for his own usage- and so his now namesake brand was born. “I always had contracts as a consultant for big brands, so I always had the chance to work with labs,” he explains of how the brand came to fruition. “At the time, that was 25 years ago, I wanted to have caring products. There were a lot of products on the market for dry hair. At the time there were a lot of new formulations based around polymers and silicones, and instant effects. People used to come once or twice a week to get a blow dry or a curl, and they used to keep their hair clean all week but thanks to these new formulations you could wash your hair at home, dry it yourself and it would become straight. Those formulations were coating the hair and coating the scalp, and all of a sudden you had to wash your hair much more often.”

Christophe’s first two creations are still the two he cites as his favourites. “If I could only keep two products from my range for caring for the hair, they would be my Lavender Oil and the Cleansing Mask With Lemon. The formulation has never changed. It drives me crazy when you like a product and they say ‘Oh, we’ve changed the formula!’ I never do that. I take the time. When we launch a product we’re sure it’s going to be there forever. We never want to create a problem- we want to solve the problem.”

“The Cleansing Mask With Lemon was the first non-lathering shampoo, and everybody said ‘You’re nuts. It will never work.’ I said ‘I don’t care, I’ll just do it for me.’ Everyone was talking about the top models and which products they were using, so we started to have a lot of press around those two products.” From there, cult French boutique Colette decided to capitalise on the buzz and picked up the original Christophe Robin collection. “Everybody wanted whatever was at Colette, and that’s how I started the distribution of my products.”

Despite the increased demand for product, Christophe didn’t feel pressured to speed up the process of formulating new products. “Some of them take eight years, some take three months,” tells me of the time it can take between conceptualisation and completion. “The first products were very quick, because I had a very clear idea of what I wanted. I wanted vegetable oil, because there is nothing better to restore the elasticity of the hair and avoid breakage. We had to use nature, with a little bit of chemistry. We had to use a little chemistry to shape the molecule and make them a little thinner. When they are too thick and you put an oil onto your hair, be it olive oil, argan oil, the lipids are so thick that they take a while to get inside your hair and, when they do, they remove the artificial pigments. I wanted the best of nature, but I could not have an oil that would remove any artificial colour.”

Across his entire product line, Christophe continues to turn to the simplicity of natural ingredients, fusing them with modern chemistry. “People believe the more ingredients, the more effective the product. It’s like food. When you put too much into it, you lose the flavour. They’re like old recipres- the sea salt scrub was something I would always use to avoid allergies post-colour or to remove residue of chemicals left on the scalp. It’s been used for hundreds of years. If you look into the books of old herbalists, they used to heal the scalp with sea salt and rhassoul. Rhassoul has been in Morocco for hundreds of years to remove sebum and to remineralise the skin and the hair. They’re simple ingredients, truly. I believe in simple ingredients. The more you put into a formulation, the more the ingredients fight with each other and the less active it becomes.”

The Christophe Robin collection is now available in 30 countries worldwide, with Christophe citing his tenure as Colour Expert for L’Oréal Paris as being integral to his understanding of what works from region to region. “I was 17 when I began with L’Oréal,” he tells me. “It was like driving a Ferrari- the labs, the marketing. It was fun to work with them.”

As Christophe’s time with L’Oréal comes to an official close (although he does tell me “I’ll miss them- I’ll still be in there helping, I’m sure), what does the future hold for Christophe Robin- both the man, and his brand?

“I’m not somebody who is planning the future. I embrace the present. We will see where it goes, but we always keep that same ethic of making products that are going to help women to feel more comfortable and beautiful.”