Yakushima: Nicole Kae's Hair Collection Inspired by an Ancient Japanese Forest
Beneath a canopy of deep emerald, where the air turns cool and the ground wears a carpet of fallen needles, Yakushima is alive. Cedar-shadowed silhouettes lean into the breeze, their whispers drifting across marshes. Tranquil yet tectonic, their beauty sits far outside the boundaries of convention — perfect imperfections, alluring and enigmatic. They are the forest’s kami, living sculptures of nature’s understated power, their stillness a reverent, threaded rhythm that echoes the island’s ancient breath.
Nicole Kae’s new hair collection, Yakushima, takes its name directly from the island that inspired it. The island sits off the southern coast of Kyushu, its cedar forest old enough to blur the line between organism and landscape. For Kae, that forest supplied raw material directly: peeling bark, fungal spores, the thorny snap of a branch that refuses to grow the way convention expects.
It’s the kind of stimulus Kae has built her reputation on. She has a habit of finding texture other stylists overlook. Then she pushes it into shapes that seem to fight gravity, while staying rooted in real technical control. Yakushima marks her boldest attempt yet in a hair collection built from one specific source, rather than an abstract mood board.
The color work stays close to the forest floor: mossy darks, weathered ambers, the faded gold of dry needles. Nothing reaches for anything more saturated. A deep burgundy fringe curls into wire-thin tendrils that lift off the temples on their own. Elsewhere, a waist-length blonde stays rough and wave-heavy, its shadow root doing the work a harsher cut might otherwise do. Heavy black braids, threaded through with raffia and paper ribbon, hang like vines pulled loose from the canopy. A short, spiky crop shifts from black roots into copper curls. A single bare branch runs directly through the hair, extending past the frame.
Styling followed the same brief: raw-edged fabric, shapes that read more like structure than clothing, built alongside the hair rather than around it.
Yakushima marks a noticeable shift for Kae, more sculptural than her earlier work. But it stays anchored in the same place her career always has: editorial hair, built from something real.
Creative direction and hair by Nicole Kae. Photography by Andrew O’Toole. Styling by Ysha. Makeup by Mikele Simone.
