I spent my Sunday in a chair, so I could turn into the alien unicorn that I deserve to be.

My inspirational gal pal, festival buddy, and hair muse Stef Toews invited me into her good hands in collaboration with her resident salon, SPACE. A gem of Michael Levine’s salon group, the team at SPACE partnered up with newly launched technicolour power product Pulp Riot and wanted to showcase the magic that Stef and all of the amazing ladies and gents at their salon craft impeccably. Myself and a handful of other fun unicorns took over the salon for the day as we celebrated individuality and standing out!

A little blurb about why Pulp Riot was being featured: this product has stepped up into a high quality of unicorn level, an improved colour that has the right consistency that colourists crave and can now, finally, apply. It stays in better and longer than ever before, is highly pigmented and is true to how it paints. Micheal Levine’s good friends David and Alexis Thurston at LA based hair company Butterfly Loft have created Pulp Riot through their high profile profile educator collective, Butterfly Circus. Product development thrives in situations of expertise, and one can definitely see the quality in how easy it was for the colourists to work with. It’s no shock that myself and every other alien unicorn there loved their results.

Michael Levine is the only Canadian member of Butterfly Circus, so it should be noted that this collective is some of the best in the continent. It’s so complimenting to all the creatives at SPACE, as well as the educators and students that were also involved during the event. Besides Levine and his wife creating a popular product brand called Product (lol) for his salons and  clients, they have laid down the foundations for education. It can be a crazy environment, Michael and his wife, “saw a need and we saw that kids were spending a small fortune on hairdressing education and were being sold a lie. We created a no-bullshit approach to hairdressing education, where we don’t sugarcoat the bad stuff and we graduate people well-prepared for the challenges they will face in order to succeed. And it worked. We won the 2012 and 2014 Canadian Student Stylist of the Year awards in Toronto, 2012 being our first year open”.

After a moment of being bleach blonde Olalplex style (the high tech product that saves hair integrity through bleaching), Stef went in for the two tone. A Ke$ha-inspired look, we did blends of coral, pink, and purple primarily on one side and blue-green on the other. My first time having this much bleach and rainbow colour on my Jewish curls had be all kinds of nervous, but there was no need. It’s funny how that now turned into me feeling more like myself.

Some of the best hair art is taking over at SPACE, check out @sstefstyles on Instagram for all her masterpieces and book with her asap! xx

Photography provided my Michael Levine himself.