Oshun is eliminated in week 1 of Shear Genius

Season 2 of Shear Genius started off with a bang. Judge Sally Hershberger has been replaced by Kim Vo, a master colorist and celebrity stylist. Kim and host Jaclyn Smith met the twelve contestants in the salon to give them their first short cut challenge. The twelve finalists are:

Paulo
Nekisa
Charlie
Nicole
Daniel
Dee
Matthew
Gail
Parker
Glenn
Oshun
Meredith

The hair models come out wearing safety goggles and the stylists are really curious and kind of worried as to what the challenge would be. They had every right to be worried – their challenge was to cut and style the model’s hair in 45 minutes while blindfolded. Kim Vo would rank the contestants in order from 1 to 12 which would play a role in the elimination challenge. Dee won the challenge. I’ll go into the order in which they finished in a minute.

The elimination challenge seemed ordinary enough – give the models a hairstyle inspired by a celebrity or famous person. The models turn over their cards to reveal that these celebrities are cartoon characters. Each character would be done by two stylists. The stylists had 2.5 hours to create the look and the winner of the challenge would get immunity from elimination in the next elimination challenge. Mentor Rene Fris told them to not play it safe because they would not win the challenge by playing it safe.

Here’s the order in which the characters were selected, which was the rank given to them by Kim Vo in the shortcut challenge:

Dee – Betty Boop
Nicole – Jem
Meredith – Judy Jetson
Glenn – Jem
Daniel – Wilma Flintstone
Gail – Wilma Flintstone
Charlie – Marge Simpson
Matthew – Marge Simpson
Paulo – Judy Jetson
Parker – Betty Boop
Nekisa – Lucy Van Pelt
Oshun – Lucy Van Pelt

The regular panel of judges include Jaclyn, Kim Vo, and Kelly Atterton (the west coast editor for Allure magazine). Guest judge was Neeko, a celebrity hair stylist.

The judges name the six stylists who are in the middle and ask them to leave. The top three and bottom three remain, and ironically enough there were two of each cartoon character – Marge, Wilma and Lucy.

The top three stylists were Charlie, Nekisa, and Daniel. The judges thought that Charlie took a risk and that they love that fact. They thought his huge blue hairstyle was fun and made them laugh. Nekisa gave a sweet, innocent and wearable interpretation of Lucy and thought it worked well today. Daniel’ s Wilma was sexy, modern and innovative. Daniel ended up winning the challenge.

The bottom three were Oshun, Gail and Matthew. The judges thought Oshun’s style was unfinished and didn’t flatter the model’s face. They thought that Gayle’s style was not well thought out and was neither fun nor modern. The judges said Matthew missed the mark – they called it more Peg Bundy than Marge Simpson and thought the style lacked the height and playfulness of the character.

In the end it was Oshun who was sent home. Oshun was a very confident and cocky competitor. I’m sure he has to have some good credentials and talent in order to make it this far but come on……he was downright arrogant. He said in his exit interview that his strategy was to play it safe and play down his talent for the first two challenges and then blow everyone away. I think he made the mistake of assuming that his work, toned down or not, would be good enough to survive elimination. If he didn’t bring it right away in the first challenge then there’s no way he’d be able to bring it on when he needed to as the challenges got more crazy and complex.

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