How To Recreate Mary-Kate & Ashley Olsen's Signature Wavy Hair

Mark Townsend started working with Marky-Kate and Ashley Olsen when they were just 16 years old, and subsequently he’s been responsible for the pair’s most iconic hair moments through out the years.

So, naturally when the celebrity hair stylist sat down to speak with the hosts of the Gloss Angeles podcast, beauty journalists Kirbie Johnson and Sara Tan, he was asked about how he created the Olsen Twin’s signature wave.

“They have such different hair, I approach it completely differently, [and] use different products for each [sister],” Mark explained to the podcast hosts. “Ashley’s hair is much curlier than Mary-Kate’s, and it’s much darker. But Mary-Kate’s is a little more course.”

“What’s so funny is how [the waves have] changed so much [and] the whole process of getting ready — it used to be a fight who sat in my chair first,” he shared.

The styling products Mary-Kate and Ashley used in the ’00s

Mary-Kate and Ashley would sit down in Mark’s chair with soaking wet hair, he told Gloss Angeles. Then he would have to blow dry their hair, and wrap sections around a curling iron to reintroduce texture. The hairstylist used tons of dry shampoo on the twins’ roots, and a salt spray like the classic Bumble & Bumble Surf Spray ($26 from MECCA). As well as, John Frieda’s Frizz Ease hair serum ($17.99 from Chemist Warehouse) and hair cream ($17.99 from Chemist Warehouse), to make the ends look piece-y.

“If you go back and look [at] the early ’00s, everyone looks like they had greasy hair,” he joked. We needed to put that Frizz Ease away, John Frieda. It was getting a little too heavy on everybody.”

“Everyone was afraid of a flyaway. They were too in the beginning, and then they started getting more into air drying,” he went on to say. “Then the fight always became about who would have to come to me first, because they wanted to airdry as much as possible.”

How to copy the Olsen Twins’ signature air dry waves

“There was one year for Met Gala — Ashley was wearing the most beautiful orange and citrus tone vintage Dior gown — I wouldn’t say she was purposefully going against theme, but the theme was very much about the machine age era in fashion, or something like that,” Mark dished to the podcast hosts.

“So Ashley found this insane gown that was completely handmade — like women spent hundreds of hours sewing every jewel onto this gown — [and she said to me] ‘I don’t want to use heat, I don’t want to use tools, [I want to] keep this going’,” he continued.

“So I set her hair with clips and let it air dry — and it turned out so perfect — to pull her curl out just a little bit around the face,” the hair stylist explained. “Jesus was our reference, it was very much like a statue of Jesus, with the wave right around the face.”