From the jellyfish cut to airbrushed colour, the OOO-ing Studio in Taichung City, Taiwan has been hugely influential on the hottest hair trends to come out of the last year. Now, the salon has teamed up with Sun Buddies for a new campaign that celebrates having fun with your hair and expressing yourself through beauty.

The Swedish eyewear brand handed over its latest styles to the stylists at OOO-ing Studio and gave them complete artistic freedom to create six hairstyles inspired by the sunglasses. The result is a series of portraits of friends and clients of the studio that imagines what each character would look like if they were living in a futuristic virtual world.

“We always create a suitable environment before designing, a ‘vibe’ to be precise,” Light Liao, art director of OOO-ing Studio, says about their creative process. “This is the most fun part of creation, we get to decide the feeling that the hairstyle delivers to people.” For this project with Sun Buddies, the team wanted to create a sense that these people were living in a futuristic virtual city which is “between the real and the unreal”.

For each of the models in the shoot, the creative team dreamed up lifestyles and personalities, imagining what each one would wear and how they would express themselves. “It’s just like creating a character in our mind and we love doing it because it brings a more interesting perspective to designing and it motivates us to try different colour matching and styles,” says Liao. 

They also drew inspiration from patterns, colours and names of each pair of sunglasses. The Deep Blue Sea glasses worn by Courtney, for example, reminded them of the sun shining into the ocean and producing shades of blue light. “For the hair design part, we also hoped to create a sense of seaweed floating in the sea. These ideas are then mixed with the ‘vibe’ that we’d like to present from the start, and gradually created a different sense of each character.”