How To Get the 'Gone Girl' Hairstyle That's Sure to Be the Next Big Thing
Merrick Morton
There’s scene in the film “Gone Girl” which has many a female fan chattering and it’s not the part where Ben Affleck supposedly flashes the audience with his boy parts. It’s near the end when Rosamund Pike’s character appears on screen with a sleek, short do to end all dos.
Technically, it’s a bob with a strong shape—cropped to just below her chin—but what makes it so lust worthy is the volume and texture. Not a sleek glassy sheet or all fluffy bounce, it’s somewhere in between.
In the film, she’s cut it herself to improve her appearance, but “when I saw it, I was like, ‘There’s no way that’s a home haircut,’” says Wes Sharpton, a stylist at Hairstory salon in New York. “It’s perfectly imperfect. It’s done strategically so that some strands don’t match up. You can see that one front piece is a little bit longer, so even though there’s a line, it’s diffused and slightly erratic.”
Sharpton advises going to a stylist who knows how to cut hair with a straight razor–that’s what creates a line that looks piece-y and easy. “You want it to move and be sexy,” he says. “You don’t want a cut that looks like you molded the hair into something it’s not.” If you have thick hair you might have to shear a bit from underneath. Pike revealed her shaved bottom layers on the red carpet.
Still let the stylist—and not the inspiration pictures of Pike on your phone—dictate how short you can go. “You want to bring it up to a line that works and frames you best,” Sharpton says. “If you subtract yourself from the equation, that’s when haircuts go wrong. You don’t want to basically buy a wig.”
As for shape, he suggests to go with more of a square cut than the semi-angled, A-line one Pike has. “Hers is a little bit shorter in the back, but you have to remember that celebrities have a team around them,” he says. “When an ordinary person does those shorter to longer ones, it’s really hard for it not to look kind of angsty teen punk rock feeling.”
To style it, just put a bit of texturizing product like Purely Perfect’s Foundation Crème in damp hair, comb through, and let it dry. The goal is to keep your strands lean against your head. “Too much volume is going to feel newscaster-y,” Sharpton says. Nail big screen “Gone Girl” noir instead.
