There are few more dramatic ways to change your look than by changing your hair colour, and a mix of a vast range of dye products and the salon-quality skills of hairdressers combine to provide a beautiful, dramatic result.
In one way or another, hair dyes have existed for thousands of years, with ingredients such as lime washes, henna, indigo, senna, turmeric and alma being used for decades to provide vivid albeit short-lived and somewhat unsubtle results.
This began to change at the turn of the 20th century with a patent filed in France in 1907 for a new method of dyeing hair using synthetic ingredients.
The man who filed the patent was Eugene Schueller, then a 25-year-old chemist who created a blend of chemical compounds that compared to the intense ingredients typically used was relatively gentle on hair, harmless on the skin and produced more subtle, natural-looking results.
It was also much faster and more predictable than other methods and was significantly safer than the lead-based dyes that were used at the time, which were every bit as irritating and toxic to the scalp as one might expect.
In the hands of a barber or hairstylist, it could be used to create a wide range of colours from jet black to vivid platinum blonde, and the originally planned name for the product was to be Black and Gold to reflect this.
However, he preferred the name L’Auréale, named after a halo-like hairstyle very popular in France at the time. This would be slightly altered to Oréale, and later to L’Oreal, along with the company that had by this point become one of the biggest cosmetic brands in the world.
Hair dyes would evolve in quality from there, with later formulations able to create dramatic results in just one session, and more vibrant colours and styles are available to allow people to choose the look they want.
