The sanctuary of hairdressing is pretty much the only domicile in which you can shamelessly and without ridicule, try your damndest to ape the look of another woman. In fact, it’s positively encouraged. Hair stylists rely on the dog-eared little pictures of famous women that we rip from magazines or print from Google Images. It helps them do their job better.

And so it is with zero embarrassment that I admit to my sudden yet escalating transfixion with Kate Moss’ particular shade of buttery blonde. While it flurries from cool, to warm to bright, to soft, the archetype of Kate’s blonde runs fervently through them all: the look of expense, of luxury and of style. Never will you see Kate with what appears to be a build up of highlights, nor those tell-tale stripes down the parting, nor the sort of dull, over-treated hair that I so often find myself with. It’s always shining.

It’s important too that she’s a London girl – there’s no point coveting the blonde of someone who spends most of their time hiking up Runyon Canyon in LA (Kate Hudson, Margot Robbie), the light is supremely different; the warmth of the Californian sun is kind to warmer platinum tones, while the blue-tinged grey skies of England tend would only skew those tones so they appear orange.

I’ve played with my hair colour all my life, but now at 30, I’ve resigned myself to one inescapable truth: I am a spirit blonde at heart. And so, it’s time for me to start perfecting the blonde that I plan to stick with from hereon out, and I’ve chosen Kate as my poster girl. So I went straight to the source, the source being Nicola Clarke, creative colour director for John Frieda who has been colouring Kate’s hair for fifteen years (and who also tends to the hair of Cate Blanchett, Gwyneth Paltrow and Carey Mulligan, all the exceptional blondes then). 

"The one reference we always go back to is Luke Skywalker" - Nicola Clarke, creative colour director or John Frieda

After working together for so long, Clarke says they barely need to discuss her colour, they’re so in synch. ‘Sometimes she might say, ‘Oh, I want to be blonder,’ and I’ll just say to her, ‘Well, I think we need to tone down a bit and she just lets me get on with it,’ explains Clarke as she paints the lilac-hued dye onto my hair.

But just what are the nuts and bolts of what constitutes Kate Moss blonde? What’s the secret formula? ‘We used to balayage [hand painted on the colour for a more natural look] anymore, it doesn’t need it, we just do really minimal highlights,’ explains Clarke. ‘The one reference we always go back to is Luke Skywalker – it goes from Luke Skywalker to Brdiget Bardot, those are the two variants.’ The revelation that the guy from Star Wars has been the inspiration behind Kate’s colour all along is both asbsurd and brilliant. 

But there’s also something that feels quite accessible about her colour, as though it’s firmly fixed within the realms of reality. I’m certainly not the first one to have stored a dozen images of Kate’s hair on my iPhone, poised and ready to show my colourist. ‘I do get a series of pictures in the salon, generally from the shows. It’s either Kate Moss or Kate Winslet, people seem to flit between the two.’

It hasn’t always been about blonde for Kate though. When she shot the Versace A/W14 campaign with Mert & Marcus, the doctrine from the notoriously precise photography duo was to do away with wigs and dye Kate’s trademark a blonde a dark shade of brunette. ‘They wanted it to be natural so they could whatever they wanted to do with her hair and let it move,’ says Clarke. ‘After she did the Versace job, she had gone pink so we had to take her back to her natural colour. She had Juergen Teller over at the house just to kind of document the different changes we went through to get to the natural colour again and eventually we did it. We’ve done a few brunettes over the years, but she’s not like Linda [Evangelista], she doesn’t experiment so much with colour.

And yet, a cursory glance through some photographs of Kate over the years and it’s clear that her colour does waver – from rich and creamy cashmere blonde to golden hues of sunset, to out and out platinum bombshell, each denoting a different element of her personality. Above all though, she’s no the kind of girl who wants to spend her afternoons in the salon – she’s too cool for that. ‘Kate isn’t particularly high maintenance and changing your hair colour often is a really high maintenance thing. I think, as well, there are different variants of going slightly darker and then brighter blonde so in a sense it’s always changing,’ she adds.

Following the Kate colour blueprint, Clarke lightened up my dull, mousy colour with balayage, hand-painting the baby-fine hairs around my face for a look that I am calling ‘just-got-back-from-St-Barts’ and packs me off with John Frieda Sheer Blonde Enhancing Shampoo to keep the colour vibrant. Clarke tells me, satisfyingly, that my base colour is not all that dissimilar from Kate’s. And so, all the ingredients are in place. But, as Clarke warns, it will take time to lift the colour to that of Kate’s. Like many women, I have zero patience when it comes to my hair, I want the end result yesterday, but Kate’s colour is the product of a gradual evolution, so I may not be there yet, but what I do know, is I’m in the best possible hands for the job.