'I Want That Hair!' Now Even Celebrities Take Photos to the Salon

A trip to the hairdresser is an enormous exercise in trust. You turn up with optimism - "I feel like a change" - and entrust your hair, your self-esteem, and quite possibly your future happiness (at least until it grows out) to a near-stranger. So it's no surprise that many of us take along photos of celebrities for inspiration. But it is surprising that even celebrities do it - for this week Cameron Diaz was photographed in Grazia magazine arriving at her local salon in Los Angeles with a dog-eared photo of Kate Moss.

I understand why she did it, because I, too, recently sought absurd reassurance in a photograph of another woman's hair (and I needed it a darn sight more than Diaz). After eight years of carrying about the same dull, frizzy layers, I had decided it was time for a change. Time, in fact, for a fringe. But what kind of fringe? Side-swept or blunt? Blow-dried straight or curled under? And, seeing as the last time I sported a fringe I was 12 and wearing it as part of an ill-advised pudding-bowl cut, could this be the biggest mistake of my life?

I trawled the internet for guidance. Jessica Alba's "bangs" looked promising. I wasn't so sure about Katie Holmes's fringe. Then I found it. Reese Witherspoon's. Bright, shiny, coyly side-swept, it was the Platonic ideal of a fringe. My hairdresser didn't seem to mind - the photo was examined with a smile, set aside, and the fringe duly cut. I was ecstatic - not because I could now claim to look anything like Reese, but because I had averted a potential disaster.

Others, apparently, have gone further. According to Angelo Seminara, international creative director at Trevor Sorbie, some clients arrive with a whole "mood-board" - a potentially sophisticated piece of decoupage featuring up to 100 photos of models and celebrities. "When clients have done their research," he says, "the consultation becomes a two-way process."

Stylist Akin Konizi - the reigning British Hairdresser of the Year, no less - agrees. At his salon, the most frequently requested celebrity cuts belong to Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole - and, eerily, both Cameron Diaz and Kate Moss.