The Mane Thing by Kevin Mancuso - Celebrity Hairstyles Pictures With Instructions

The Mane Thing is a 130-page book on hair care and hairstyles by Kevin Mancuso. He is a celebrity hairstylist with his own salon in New York. He is also the creative director for Nexxus Salon Hair Care. The book includes some of his career highlights at major photoshoots for women's magazines working alongside leading fashion photographers.

Cindy Crawford writes the foreword and Mancuso then introduces himself and his book with pages lined by small magazine cover photos of famous women with hair he styled.

The first half of the book is mostly about hairstyling tools. Mancuso starts with hair texture and then he writes about five power styling tools; eight different combs; and nine different brushes. Next the hairdresser summarizes clips and pins followed by coils and elastics. He ends the section with five options for rollers. There is also a short section on hair color including highlights and lowlights.

Mancuso is kind enough to reveal that the photos of gorgeous hairstyles we often see in the media represent a collaborative effort of expert beauticians who in some cases spent many hours preparing the hair models. For example, the stunning curls of supermodel Kirsty Hume took five hours to create and required the use of more than 50 perming rods.

Yet the author also provides many examples from his "style file" of hairstyles he designed which are within reach of mere mortals lacking a team of professionals. The last half of the book has large pictures with step-by-step instructions to create 31 different celebrity hairstyles.

Each picture is a full page (10x10"), and each guide has about 6-12 steps with one or two drawings to help explain the techniques. The drawing style is similar to what you see in contemporary hairstyles magazines like Sophisticate's Hairstyle Guide.

The examples you can copy are almost exclusively for women; there are only three male hair models. The focus is primarily hairdressing and not haircoloring. But Mancuso provides an excellent example of how to add highlights to straight black Asian hair.