This year I loved…
*Alice Dellal’s shaved sides with long
*Jaime Winston’s red hair and all those Brits that gave us something more than a few highlights and wag like extensions – hooray!
*England’s obsession with blow-dries
*Bobs cut with kitchen scissors
*Bobs cut with precision
*Credit crunch treatments – I have never mashed up so many avocados and put so many eggs on heads!

Christmas time in a salon has to be one of the most fun places to be! Hari’s has been buzzing with clients that arrive bearing gifts of champagne, chocolates and thoughtful, often funny, things for all the staff. Some are a little squiffy as they come from a long Christmas work lunch and amuse us while we try to keep their heads still and they jostle around with tales of their work parties and children’s nativity plays. The salon is decked out so prettily…

It is also a time of year to focus on the trainees and let them know how much we appreciate the back up they give us all year round. We have launched a Hari’s diffusion line with the new young stylists that Hari has trained and cast his watchful eye on for so long.

I learn and get so much from the trainees. They are the ones that tell me if what I’m doing is still of the moment and I base a lot of my trends on the way they want to wear their hair. Ross, Sabrina and Bruno: Ross with his achingly cool way of rolling up a trouser leg and adding a new season shoe with an old vintage mac. When I teach him how to put hairpins in he sends me back styles with a twist of freshness that he has seen at a party or just how he would like his girl to look. Sabrina trained in France and was a stylist but has come to be retrained by Hari and has so much passion for the craft and Hari’s hair. Jake had three days with me before I sent him to Germany to do the Pussycat Dolls’ hair with Timothy Crispin. I love seeing it all through their eyes; it makes it so much more exciting – Jake updates Facebook and wows his friends as he hangs with the band.

I always need them around. When I arrive to do Jaime Winston it is their clothes that she coos over and they talk music while I style her hair. What I adore at Hari’s is that they do all of this while never forgetting to pass a pin or blow out a client with just the right amount of curl. So my photos this month are of my team. The best I have ever found and my column is in praise of our youth. Tomorrow’s stylists but, for me, today’s inspiration!

Now after a month of music parties, a week of concerts and TV shows with Anastasia and Elton John’s auction – ohhh and I met Nicole Kidman in the toilets in a studio in Germany – I am going on holiday. The dancing queen Miss Snowdon and I are off to Cuba for a fortnight. We will salsa and drink and wish for all the things we hope for this New Year.

Happy New Year!