John Frieda, Hairdresser Who Tamed Frizz, Dies at 75

Celebrity hairdresser John Frieda, who turned a 1991 silicon-based serum into the globally ubiquitous Frizz Ease range, has died at 75. His death closes a career that reshaped how the western world styles, buys and thinks about hair.

The numbers define his legacy. Boots placed an emergency order for an extra 1.2 million bottles of his thickening lotion, plus 860,000 tubs of styling wax, after he demonstrated the product on television's Richard & Judy daytime show in 1988. In 2002, Frieda and his business partner Gail Federici sold John Frieda Professional Hair Care to Japan's Kao Corporation for $450 million. In plain terms: a salon stylist built a business worth nearly half a billion dollars.

How did a London junior become a household name?

Frieda entered the profession in the 1960s, when Vidal Sassoon's slick geometry was the radical novelty of the age. He started as a junior at the West End London salon of Leonard Lewis — "Leonard of Mayfair" — who quickly selected the serious-minded lad as a detail-conscious assistant, especially for fashion shoots.

Frieda adopted his mentor's belief in co-operation between stylist and client, and never imposed a look on an unwilling head. He learned technique fast and invented freely with cuts, which mattered most in that era. He would cut the Beatles' hair, riffing on Lewis's early-60s mop-head shapes for the band, and join them afterwards for a Wimpy and a talk about eastern philosophy.

His most famous cut came in 1976: the sculpted pudding-basin "Purdey" bob for Joanna Lumley in the television series The New Avengers, which became a nationwide fad. He also scissored flat hair into cheeky urchin cuts for Shirley MacLaine and for Diana, Princess of Wales — arriving, in one revealing episode, to style a secretive portrait session for the photographer Lord Snowdon without knowing Diana was its subject.

On Vogue shoots in the late 60s and early 70s with photographers David Bailey, Barry Lategan and Clive Arrowsmith, Frieda found that celebrities had image problems like everybody else. He was quietly sympathetic to anyone who faced the mirror with him, and, unusually for the trade, he did not dish. What was murmured in Frieda's stayed in Frieda's.

What changed the history of hair?

Frieda was born into the business. His grandfather, a Jewish émigré from Poland and pogroms, worked as a barber in Fleet Street; his father, Isidore Frieda, owned a salon in Ealing, west London, and was sometimes called to the Hyde Park hotel to shave or style celebrity guests. Frieda's mother was Hannah (nee Docherty).

Educated at King's school, Harrow, he picked up grips in the salon on Saturdays. At 16 he defied his father's ambition that he become a doctor and left education for hairdressing. His father then used every connection to place him as an apprentice in Lewis's salon, where he rose to creative director.

Among the stars he styled was the pop singer Lulu, whom he married in 1976 with many of that week's Top 10 hitmakers as guests. He refused to be known merely as "Mr Lulu" — he wanted a solid empire of his own. Through his 20s he bought property with substantial earnings (his one youthful flash was a gold Rolls-Royce), financing his first salon, opened in 1976 in New Cavendish Street on the unfashionable edge of Marylebone. It became the buzziest venue in town, booked out months ahead, and led to further salons in New York, Los Angeles, Ibiza and elsewhere.

Why did frizz make his fortune?

After more than a decade of running salons, Frieda wearied of individual heads, feeling he had run out of tonsorial challenges. The massive 1988 Boots order came as a release.

He had met Gail Federici, an American haircare executive, and in 1989 they formed John Frieda Professional Hair Care. Her hair frizzed — and, as Frieda pointed out, so did the strands of 60% of western populations, roughly three in every five people. She suggested he work on a temporary fix allowing a woman to walk out smooth-headed into a damp day without instant disaster.

The result, in 1991, was the first silicon-based serum of its kind: the first care product sold for — and likely the earliest even to acknowledge — the existence of frizz. Related products followed, plus ranges to enhance colour and curls. Today every beauty chain stocks metres of shelves of curl custards and scrunching jellies, among which Frizz Ease's purple livery remains a fixture. After the 2002 sale, Frieda retained his salons and stayed closely associated with the Mayfair flagship, where products were trialled.

Frieda's deeper achievement was aesthetic. When he began styling, women wanted a great hairdo — a cut and set, a fixed look, as if wearing a hat grown from their own material. In the 21st century, they want to look as if they have great hair: its natural self, in the best condition, straight or kinked. Frieda was the pioneer who made that change practical.

His marriage to Lulu ended in divorce in 1991. Avery Agnelli, widow of the industrialist Giovanni Agnelli, became his partner in 2002; they married in 2019. He is survived by her, his son Jordan from his marriage to Lulu, his children Jackson and Leyla from his marriage to Avery, and his stepdaughter Asia.