Princess Diana’s secret to avoiding ‘helicopter hair’ revealed

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961 - 1997) at a state reception in Hobart, Tasmania in April 1983. She is wearing the Spencer family tiara and pearl and diamond earrings, which were a gift from the Emir of Qatar. Photo / Getty Images

Diana, Princess of Wales used a custom-made spray to avoid being photographed with “helicopter hair”.

The late royal was worried about her trademark style being messed up by gusts of wind, so she asked beauty expert Sheree Ladove Funsch and her hair stylist Sam McKnight to come up with a special hairspray that would keep her pixie cut looking perfect no matter what.

Ladove Funsch told New York Post column Page Six: “I am actually a cosmetic chemist by trade ... I developed this reputation of creating products that would fix celebrities’ needs ... I got this call ... and Princess Diana had this need, so I worked really closely with her and her hairdresser [Sam McKnight] at the time.”

“She had that beautiful ... pixie cut. When she would get off the helicopter, the blades would just spin and spin and ... her beautiful coiffed, cute little cut would go crazy.”

She added: “She didn’t want anything that would make her hair look glued down because she was ... so young and so beautiful. She didn’t want to look old and [sport] a helmet-head kind of look, so I had to create a hairspray. The nickname was ‘helicopter hairspray’, so that was her personal hairspray.”

Ladove Funsch added that Diana also had another custom hair product mixed up for her because she couldn’t use the helicopter hairspray when she was wearing a tiara as the chemicals could damage the precious gemstones.

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961 - 1997) with her son Prince Harry during a holiday with the Spanish royal family at the Marivent Palace in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in August 1987. Photo / Getty Images

She explained: “There were two versions. There was the helicopter and then there was the jewel version ... We had to create something that wasn’t as potent as a hairspray but that would still give her a bit of hold … without ruining the jewels.”

However, she insists the late royal never had any plans to launch her hairsprays as a commercial venture. She added: “I’m not saying she wouldn’t have launched it eventually and [didn’t want] to do something like that, but that wasn’t the intention. It was just to [create] something amazing [for her].”