At this year’s prestigious Alternative Hair Show awards in Milan, Lithuania will be represented on the world stage for the first time. Šiauliai-born stylist Oksana Donelaitė-Dūdienė, 49, has reached the global finals in the Cut & Colour category.
Her breakthrough owes much to Jorge Cancer – known in the beauty world as Jorge X – repeatedly named the world’s best hairdresser and creator of the unique pixel colouring technique. The Spaniard invited Donelaitė-Dūdienė into his Quantum Hair team, becoming her mentor.
Cancer gave the Šiauliai-based stylist – who had been travelling across Europe’s big cities for beauty shows and training events – the push she needed to create her own collection.
“When was the last time you let your creativity out?” the Spaniard asked her – a question that proved decisive.
Donelaitė-Dūdienė's mentor also helped her craft a stage name. Instead of her long and hard-to-pronounce Lithuanian surname, the fashion world now knows her simply as OXA.
Offered to be her mentor
Cancer and Donelaitė-Dūdienė had known each other for more than a decade. She had previously assisted his team at The Masters Show in Madrid, Lisbon and Warsaw, and worked as his personal assistant during a photoshoot and global launch of one of his collections.
In May last year, Cancer was invited to Lithuania for training sessions organised by the national hairdressers’ association. Donelaitė-Dūdienė was asked to look after him and act as interpreter.
“When was the last time you let your creativity out?” he asked. When she admitted modestly that Lithuania’s market was small and staging an international show was difficult, Cancer promised to take care of everything.
He invited her to join his Quantum Hair Mentor programme, urging her to come to Madrid to create a collection, and pledged to assemble a team of top professionals.
A dream team
Donelaitė-Dūdienė admits she had long dreamed of creating her own collection, but daily commitments – the salon, seminars, training, travel, family – always got in the way.
The ongoing war in Ukraine also gave her a push, she says: “I realised how fragile everything is, and I wanted to leave my own mark, my own legacy.”
The stylist made her decision very suddenly – that same July she flew to Madrid with 32 kilograms of hair dye in her luggage to begin work on the collection.
In Spain, a surprise awaited her: her mentor had assembled what she describes as a dream team – top photographer Javier Marquez, make-up artist Lewis Amarante and videographer Javier Haro.
She did not meet them immediately, however. It was only after the first colouring, when the dye was rinsed out and the result revealed, that Cancer immediately picked up the phone to confirm the booking of a photo studio.
“Later he explained it to be like my own Olympic Games – you have to show results straight away. If you don’t, you go back and keep training,” Donelaitė-Dūdienė recalls.
Inspired by the colours of the ocean
She named her collection 11 – because the presentation happened on July 11, the studio number was 11, 11 was the number of looks that were created, even the car was parked in space number 11.
The unifying theme was the ocean – the vivid colours of coral and fish.
The stylist smiles that all good girls dream of pretty mermaids. Yet her own mermaid, she admits, is angry about pollution. “We hairdressers throw away so much dye and plastic. I really care about this issue – that’s why when I colour hair I only put on one glove, because only one hand touches the dye. Can you imagine how many gloves that saves over 30 years?”
One model’s hair was coloured to resemble salmon skin, another took on the look of a fierce bird, and a third evoked a snake.
She is delighted that her work also carries a touch of Lithuanian identity – a Lithuanian model living in Spain was chosen to take part.
The collection, 11, was completed in just five days. The most time-consuming style took 18 hours to finish.
A world of new opportunities
The Lithuanian’s full collection has not yet been shown publicly – the video clip and final photographs were only completed this summer. Yet the name OXA is already well recognised: last year, she and her mentor took third place at the Live Fashion Hair Global international competition in Tenerife, in the Creative Colourist of the Year category.
Her collection, 11, may soon pick up more prizes. This September, its video clip will compete for the top award at the AIPP Presse Coiffure contest in France.
“I tried telling the video team that my contribution was small. But they replied that without my work there would have been no good video,” OXA recalls of her collaboration with the creative crew.
She was also encouraged to forget about the size of her home country. “Yes, Madrid has four million people and Lithuania as a whole – far fewer. But what matters most is what you create. Social platforms don’t care where you’re from or where you live,” she was told.
Last year, Donelaitė-Dūdienė experienced another first: she was invited to perform on the main stage of the Modern Barber Stage show in London. At the same event she worked alongside global stars Eric Lovemore and Rob Wood of Novo Cabelo. A week later, she was on stage again, this time in Dubai.
A quiet approach to clients
Born in Mažeikiai, OXA moved to the regional centre – Šiauliai – to pursue a career in hairdressing, while still underage. For many years, she and her team have worked from their own salon in Šiauliai.
Her salon, tucked away in the centre of Šiauliai, does not even have a sign. The acclaimed stylist says that even though she has never tried to lure clients, those wishing for an appointment must often wait months.
“I will never reveal who my clients are. To me, all clients are equal and I respect their confidentiality. The Germans taught me that once a cape is draped over the shoulders, a banker and a cleaner become the same – they are simply clients. Once the cape is removed, they are no longer ours, though many of them now feel like family,” she says.
The stylist insists, that all her awards and achievements changed nothing. “For 33 years I have stood behind the chair doing the work I love. I would never trade that for competitions or the stage,” the stylist reflects.
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