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Nabila takes the beauty game to the next level
L'Oreal Professionnel comes to Pakistan with Musharaf Hai as CEO and Nabila in the creative hot seat. International cricket may not be coming back to Pakistan for a long time, but this cosmetic brand from Paris is definitely here to stay.

Nabila has never been a conformist, never someone who follows the rules, which explains why she will dress down in a kaftan and flats while Karachi's society elite clicks around in six inch tall Prada's. She will attend the LSAs in a Buddhist monk's attire while the rest of the industry pulls out their diamonds and finery. If the world is going one way, she can be expected to walk the other. Nabila likes to make her own rules, evident in the choices she makes in her personal life. She sets new challenges for herself and considers "outdoing herself" her biggest challenge. "I am my biggest competitor," she often says. If that sounds oddly narcissistic and bizarre, well, that too is Nabila in a nutshell.

But that is how she constantly manages to raise the bar and 'creative kookiness' apart, the best thing about Nabila is the professionalism she maintains and the fact that she is a go-getter is every sense of the word. She has trained a team of extremely professional stylists and has salons in Lahore as well as Karachi. She brought Pakistan's first high end nail bar to both cities and one can vouch for the fact that once you've been to Nail Express, no other nail service can be good enough. Nabila has also managed a successful image consultancy firm for many years now: Zinc has catered to Babra Sharif, Wasim Akram, Shoaib Akhter, Ali Zafar and Hadiqa Kiani being just a few of her high profile clients. So when Musharaf Hai was planning to pull in L'Oreal Paris, there could have been no better bait from Pakistan that Nabila. And riding the L'Oreal wave that night - when fashion's top tier mingled with corporate honchos - Nabila launched a personal campaign called 'Nabila Changes' with a three minute video for L'Oreal.

"When we sent this video to Paris, our artistic director exclaimed that this video had been made in Paris," remarked Planchon. "I told him 'No, this video is made in Pakistan!'"
"What exactly will Nabila's designation be at L'Oreal?" a journalist asked at the press conference she had hosted at her Park Towers salon earlier the same day.

"Nabila is Nabila," replied Musharaf Hai. "She does not need to be anything else."
Planchon explained that while L'Oreal's consumer products like shampoos and the skincare range were already officially being distributed in Pakistan, they were now bringing in L'Oreal Professionnel. If business went well, they would eventually bring in Kerastase, Redkin and Matrix - other professional ranges. While these are professional lines, L'Oreal at large also includes 'luxury' cosmetic brands such as Lancome. For now it might just be L'Oreal's Professionnel range coming to Pakistan but who knows what else the future might hold. As Marc Planchon replied when a woman asked how L'Oreal would fare in Pakistan during this economic crunch: "You don't stop going to the hairdresser do you," he smiled. For the time being, L'Oreal's Professionnel range would be available at a number of selected salons including Nina Lotia and Sabs, where hairdressers would then be trained and educated on how to use them. Nabila - who extensively trained with the brand in London last year - is the only one selected to work on image development in Pakistan. Hence the music video.

"We have seasonal colour collections at L'Oreal," explained Marc Planchon, "just like fashion. And when we come up with a campaign for the collection, we tell our key stylists in all representative countries to interpret those campaigns in their own way. I must say Nabila did a fabulous job and our people in Paris were blown away by what she put together."

The video, which depicts the theme 'Thriller' for Spring/ Summer 2009 should be playing on TV channels by now, is a three minute presentation of pure colour: dripping nail lacquer, paint infusing in water, a blend of pearls and lilies and a lot of tactile relevance to shades of style. Set off to a remixed version of Naheed Akhtar's 'Tarrapta Hai Yeh Dil' produced by Emu under the label of Emix, it is an impressive piece of music that can easily be enjoyed for its own melody rather than just the visual content. It is eye candy that is just as easy on the ear.

In a characteristic manner, Nabila reinvents two of Pakistan's fashion models: Nausheen Shah emerges as a fatal blond and Tatmain as a vixen red head. The new girl, Neelam could be any one of the exotic heroines from a James Bond movie.

"Hair colours were important to me for this video," says Nabila. "Coming from Abbottabad, Nausheen had the right hair, fair skin and light eyes. For Tatmain's role we needed someone with arrogance and attitude, which Tatmain had. Neelam was just a pretty petite face and an ideal secret agent, which we were portraying her to be. They were all reinvented."

Reinvention is the word Nabila uses over and over again and it is in this quest to uncover and rediscover new avatars that Nabila keeps herself so excited about things around her. Her newly renovated salon welcomes the change too: the twilight whites and smoky grey replaced by pinks and a florescent shade of purple. Flashy, in one word. For a woman whose wardrobe has always predominantly been black, white and shades of grey this reinvention is unbelievable. But it is very much part of her now, from the crimson loungers on her rooftop to the brightly labeled tubes of L'Oreal Professionnel hair colour displayed in a newly constructed 'colour bar' at her salon.

Colour, it appears, is most certainly here to stay.