Luca Bruguera: “The most important thing is to never stop learning”

The article was first published in Makeup&YOU Professional magazine.

How did you start your career in the beauty industry? This is hereditary for me. My mother was a hairdresser, I often watched her actions in the hairdresser. Then he himself began to work in our family salon, and after many years of family-team work, he independently began to collaborate with companies that dealt with hairdressing products. This business pulled me in and took me on a journey around the geographical world and the world of fashion and hairdressing beauty. You work with two brands – ING Professional and Hair Company. Why them? How did they gain your trust? Both brands are represented by the same manufacturer; the quality and seriousness of this company was important to me. She invests a lot and focuses on innovation and research. This is very inspiring, stimulating, mobilizing me as a specialist who works there, to constantly be in search of new solutions, forcing me to think and offer new materials as raw materials. This helps us always achieve something that has not yet occurred to any of our competitors, and always feel ahead. Do you attend master classes of your colleagues? Undoubtedly! You should always be aware of what is happening in your field of activity and never stop learning. The desire to learn something new should not be lost, so I always enjoy attending master classes of my colleagues. I really like the English stylists of the Vidal Sassoon and Toni&Guy academies. Their founders are Italians who at one time moved to London. Their master classes, including the latest ones, have always made and continue to make an indelible impression on me. Vidal Sassoon himself has long been dead, but we are talking about his academy, his methodology, the style that he created. What is special about your master classes? The most important and advantageous thing, in my opinion, is communication with the public. Of course, you need to be open to this, put yourself on the same level as the audience from the very beginning, so that there are no barriers. I can't stand people who immediately put themselves on a pedestal and climb on it during communication. It seems to me that the most important thing is to be accessible and sensitive, to be yourself, and not to try to present yourself as something. And how do you like the Ukrainian public? The audience in the hall reacted strongly, and this makes me happy, not embarrassed. This suggests that people have a great desire to learn, to learn something new, that the public is very malleable for moving forward. A moment that for me contains elements of both positive and negative - it seemed to me that Ukrainian masters were too methodical or mathematical, so to speak. They are too attached to quantities, proportions, formulas, etc. This all comes with experience: you need to go beyond the limits, there must be a flight of thought. Yes, on the one hand, the methodology presupposes accuracy, precision, regularity, correctness, and on the other hand, if you do not go beyond what is calculated and permitted, there will be no achievements and discoveries. I would like to wish my colleagues to create more boldly. Of course, at the stage of preparation, training, and training, accuracy is needed. For example, preparing a product for use requires accuracy and thoroughness. But the process itself already allows for some kind of creative flight. Do you often experiment and improvise? At the master class I was able to spontaneously experiment. The idea came to mind to use a piece of water hose for an unusual purpose - to fix curls. I literally came up with this the day before, tried it and did it. The hairdresser needs to get out of this constant routine stagnation, experience some kind of pleasure, have fun. Sometimes some items not related to our work can help us! I think that everyday life and routine are death for a master. It is the desire to go beyond that that brings us the impetus of enthusiasm and inspiration. The desire to be inspired by new things, to invent something. Internal stimuli may even unconsciously cling to what you see. Remember the black and white film of Charlie Chaplin, where he works in a factory, makes the same movements all the time he works, and when he comes home, he remains the same - repeats the same movements? Because a person is squeezed into a scheme that determines his entire existence. Naturally, such inertia has a very depressing effect, putting pressure on your imagination and psyche, so you need to avoid it in every possible way. The desire to get away from the familiar and repeatable is probably the main impetus for the search. And what this search can catch on from the outside is anything. Sometimes you can be inspired by architecture, sometimes by painting - you can see an abstract painting in a cafe with some random lines, but, nevertheless, creating some kind of harmony. Illegal, not fitting into the established framework. And you say to yourself: why not put this kind of approach to beauty into practice in your work? Do you have a preference regarding hair length at work? I probably like working with short hair more, no matter how strange it may be, because short length provides more possibilities and solutions for both dye and haircuts. More often than not, women with short hair are ready for experiments and unexpected solutions. Long-haired people immediately say: “Cut no more than two centimeters, change hair color very carefully.” They are more careful and open to experiments. Do you have any favorite color preferences? Of course, I prefer warm colors, chocolate and copper shades, various shades of wood color. They remind me of warm countries, hot places and summer, nature, air... Name the taboos in women's hairstyles for you. Each master sees the world and expresses himself differently. For him, beautiful is not what is considered beautiful, but what he likes. And it has its own system of tricks, highlights and taboos. My taboo is purely personal - it is complete dissonance. When you have a mohawk on your head and an evening dress. The image must be complete!