Kate Winslet is a natural blonde—though you'd never know it from looking through images of her illustrious career. The actress has been blonde, brunette, very famously a redhead, and even shades of blue, green, and orange for roles that have ranged from teenager on a sinking ship to ex-girlfriend with her memory willingly erased and small town mayor trying to solve a horrific murder.
Winslet's hair transformations are just one of the many convincing mediums that she uses to embody the characters she's portraying on our screens. “Kate is able to pull off all these different hair colors in a believable way because of her peachy undertones,” says New York City colorist Jenna Perry. Vogue walks though some of her most dramatic color transformations and how to ask for them at the salon, below.
Subtly copper in Sense and Sensibility
“This is such a popular shade right now,” says Bobby Tochterman, co-founder of Manhattan's Maverick Salon. It's not quite “cowboy copper," he adds—but instead ask for a soft shade of blonde with a hint of copper—the bonus being this more natural hue is much easier to maintain. In the salon Tochterman would custom blend a combination of RandColor colors “Quicksand” and “Treasure” to create the shade.
Ruby red for Titanic
It's the film that blew Winslet into the stratosphere—and it's hard to image Rose without her cascade of red curls. When going to the salon, as for a “pigmented red shade,” says the natural-born redhead Perry. “This color is so pure in its tone and that's why it looks like she was born with it.” At the salon, you need to ask for a shade of red with true red undertones, according to Perry. She continues, "the way the light reflects in each coil is very wholesome, which is why it's so iconic.”
Every shade under the sun for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
This movie could have an entire stand-alone story dedicated to the hair transformations, which include primary shades of red and blue and secondary orange and green. “To preserve a bold, unnatural color like this, once it's dyed you have to commit to wetting your hair as little as possible and only use cool water when possible," Tochterman says. The gemstone shades requite much more maintenance than things that fall in the natural world, he adds, so a gloss is necessary to lock in color and shine.
Back to blonde for Revolutionary Road
“This is a classic suburban blonde,” Perry says of the hair color Winslet has for her role as aspiring actress April Wheeler. “The tone is very light golden yellow.” This isn't far off from Winslet's natural shade, which she’s shared in a previous Vogue interview is L’Oréal Paris’s at-home dye Superior Preference Hair Dye shade 9.1 (Winslet is also a spokesperson for the brand).
The October issue featuring Kate Winslet is here. Subscribe to Vogue.