Award-winning celebrity hairdresser Trevor Sorbie dies aged 75 | Beauty

The hairdresser Trevor Sorbie, who was celebrated for pioneering the wedge haircut and inventing scrunch drying, has died aged 75, his firm has introduced.

The stylist, who regularly appeared on TV and had his personal line of hair merchandise, revealed in October he had weeks to dwell after his bowel most cancers unfold to his liver.

Sorbie “handed away peacefully together with his household and beloved canine by his aspect”, his crew mentioned in a press release on Instagram on Friday. “Trevor’s journey, marked by unparalleled creativity and kindness, has left an indelible mark on the world of hairdressing and past.”

Sorbie was a four-time British Hairdresser of the Yr whose strategies had been influential on the world of hairdressing, by way of types he named the wolfman, the sculpture, and the wave, and the quick, scrunch drying course of.

Born in Paisley in 1949, he grew up in Essex. He had needed to be an artist, however after being bullied in school he started chopping hair as a 15-year-old apprentice at his father’s barbers in Ilford. “I discovered hairdressing straightforward,” he mentioned. “I went from paint to hair, each on a artistic journey.”

He labored in quite a few salons earlier than opening his first central London salon in 1977, adopted by his personal vary of styling merchandise in 1986.

The wedge, a clean and sharply angled lower pioneered by the hairdresser in 1974 whereas he was working at Vidal Sassoon, was the primary haircut to be featured in a double-page unfold in Vogue. “The wedge captured the spirit of the time and was flaunted in nightclubs around the globe,” he mentioned later. “I now understood the facility of invention. If I may obtain this as soon as, then certainly I may do it once more.”

Talking on ITV’s This Morning final month, Sorbie mentioned his invention of scrunch drying, through which the hair is squashed within the palms whereas being blowdried, had come about accidentally. “On the time you don’t know you had been groundbreaking.

“I had this woman with lengthy thick crimson porous hair. These had been women who lunch and he or she needed it dried with my palms. I mentioned, can I pace this up a bit, and I … simply bought handfuls of her hair and shook it out, and this hair simply got here out like a haystack.

“I experimented on various kinds of hair and it labored each time. Each lady on the earth has scrunched her hair.”

He went on to seem regularly on TV and styled a variety of celeb purchasers, however mentioned his greatest accolade was being made an MBE by Queen Elizabeth in 2004.

Sorbie started volunteering on the Princess Alice hospice in Esher, Surrey, after beginning to step again from the salon ground in 2006.

He advised the Instances “it actually unnerved” him when he was requested to chop the wig of a affected person for her wedding ceremony, however was advised she would possibly die earlier than then. “She died the subsequent day, however as I shut the door [after cutting her wig], I bear in mind considering for the primary time in my life: ‘I’m not only a hairdresser, I really feel particular’,” he recalled.

He then arrange the charity My New Hair to help and advise unbiased salons and stylists on offering a wig-styling service for folks with most cancers, and helped to attract up an ordinary for NHS wigs.