NEW YORK - "Hair is really funny stuff," John Frieda is saying as he tosses my locks around in his hands, contemplating their state. "Most people don't like their hair."
I hadn't thought of it that way, but right now, sitting with one of the more influential figures in hair-care history and wearing the same boring centre part I've had since Jimmy Carter was president, I couldn't agree more.
But at least I don't have frizzy hair, I'm thinking, as Frieda examines my tresses. I'm thinking about frizz because this trim, 50ish man with chiselled good looks and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair - think Ralph Lauren, only British and a decade younger - is famous for being the man who tamed that pesky plague.
A celebrity hairdresser in 1980s London, once married to the Scottish singer Lulu, he coiffed clients like Diana, Princess of Wales (including for her Vogue engagement portrait), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Raquel Welch, Diana Ross, Farrah Fawcett, one Rolling Stone and three out of four Beatles (John didn't do much with his hair).
But it was a tiny bottle of caramel-coloured goop with the decidedly inelegant name of Frizz-Ease, launched in U.S. drugstore chains in 1991, that brought Frieda fame and fortune, and made life a lot easier for thousands of women.
"It sounds ridiculous to say Frizz-Ease changed women's lives, but it did," says Linda Wells, editor-in-chief of Allure magazine. "It really changed the way women approached their hair. A lot of women have frizzy hair, and I knew women who wouldn't swim, who panicked when it rained. This gave them a solution."
It also spawned hundreds of imitators. From one product, Frieda's, in 1991, there are now close to 1,000 anti-frizz products, Wells says. It's a problem that Frieda notes ruefully. "We get copied all the time," he says. "We really need to keep showing consumers what we do. It's as simple as that."
Which is one reason we find Frieda, who sold his company to Japan's Kao Corporation in 2002 but remains heavily involved on the creative side, sitting on this recent summer day in a mobile Frieda hair salon, fashioned from an 18-wheel truck. Fitted with everything from sinks to leather couches, it's parked for a couple of days at Manhattan's South Street Seaport before promotional stops in cities across the United States - ending with Denver and Dallas in early August.
The customers, some walk-ins and others who've booked online, are getting free consultations, shampoos and blow-outs from Frieda stylists - and, of course, samples of the latest line of Frieda products.
Some of these women have frizzy hair. But that's not my problem, I smile to myself, as Frieda's quick analysis continues.
"There's some frizz down here," he says briskly. Darn! Really?
"Nothing a little serum won't fix, though," he adds. He also says I should create "a little more width" at the top of my face, to counterbalance the width at the bottom. Before I have time to contemplate what "width at the bottom" might mean, we're interrupted.
"Are you John Frieda?" a young woman calls from a distance as we chat. "You're inspirational!"
She asks that her name not be used because her employer doesn't know she's playing hooky.
An older woman calls out to him, too: "I use all your products back home in Canada," she says.
