- 95 Causeyside St., Paisley PA1 1TU, United Kingdom
Most hair qualifications take a weekend. You turn up, you watch a demo, you go home with a certificate and a tote bag. The Davines Colour Genius programme runs for six months, ends with an assessment in London, and I finished it in July 2026 — which makes Ghosted, as far as I’m aware, the only Davines Colour Genius certified colour studio in Paisley.
That distinction matters less than what sits behind it. Nobody books a colour appointment because of a framed certificate on the wall. So here’s the honest version of what those six months involved, and what it actually changes for anyone sitting in my chair on Causeyside Street.
The syllabus runs on colour theory, pigment behaviour and formulation — not styling trends. A large chunk of it is chemistry: how the underlying pigment in each level behaves during lift, why the same formula reads warm on one head and ashy on the next, and how to predict the end result before you mix rather than after you rinse.
The assessment work is submitted, critiqued and reworked. You don’t pass by turning up. Sessions were led by the Davines technical education team at Davines House in London, with certification signed off by Margaret Macdonald, Head of Technical Education, alongside the International Colour Genius project leads.
What surprised me most, after nine years in editorial and fashion styling, was how much of the programme was about restraint — knowing when a head of hair should not be lifted another level that day, and being able to explain why in terms the client can actually follow.
Corrections are where formulation knowledge either exists or it doesn’t. Someone comes in with banding from a box dye, brassy mid-lengths from a previous salon, or three different tones sitting in one head from a grown-out balayage. There is no product that fixes that. There’s only reading what’s already in the hair and mapping a sequence out of it.
The programme sharpened exactly that: sectioning a correction into stages across appointments instead of forcing it in one sitting, and calculating how much lift the hair will physically tolerate before it starts to suffer. My existing guide to expert hair colour correction covers the process itself in detail — the training changed how precisely I can forecast the outcome before we start.
For clients this shows up as fewer surprises. A colour correction quoted at two sessions stays two sessions.
There’s a cost angle people rarely connect. Colour that’s formulated correctly the first time doesn’t need a corrective toner three weeks later, and it grows out in a way that lets you stretch appointments to ten or twelve weeks instead of six.
Formulation accuracy is the difference between a blonde that softens gracefully and one that turns yellow by week four. Getting the tonal target right at the mixing bowl is what buys you those extra weeks — not the toner you buy afterwards.
I’ve worked exclusively with Davines since opening Ghosted, and the certification was a natural extension of that. Davines is an Italian family-run company and a certified B Corp, with the Naturaltech range built on 96% naturally-derived ingredients. Their sustainability position is verified rather than marketed, which is rarer in this industry than the shelf talkers suggest.
The practical reason is simpler: the pigment behaves consistently. A brand whose colour lines shift formulation every other season makes accurate prediction impossible, and prediction is the whole job.
Nothing about the booking process changes. Every colour service still opens with a free consultation, and new clients still need a skin test at least 48 hours beforehand — that’s a safety requirement, not a formality.
What’s different is the depth of that consultation. Expect more questions about what’s been on your hair before, more honesty about what’s achievable in one appointment, and a clearer plan when the answer is “we’ll get there in stages”. You can see the full range of colour services at the studio or read more about my background and how I work.
The certification joins finalist places at the Salon Awards UK in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and the Scottish Beauty Awards in 2025. Awards are judged on presented work. This one was earned through six months of assessed technical training — which, for a colourist, is the one that carries the most weight.
An advanced six-month colour certification run by Davines’ international technical education team, covering colour theory, pigment chemistry, formulation and advanced application techniques, assessed at Davines House in London.
Kacper “Casper” Kluf, owner and stylist at Ghosted, completed the programme in July 2026.
No. Service pricing at Ghosted is unchanged.
Yes. All new clients need a skin test at least 48 hours before any colour service, regardless of the stylist’s qualifications.
Yes. Corrections are the area where formulation training makes the biggest difference. Bring photos of your colour history to the free consultation so the plan can be mapped accurately.
The Naturaltech range is formulated with a high proportion of naturally-derived ingredients and is vegan and cruelty-free, though a patch test remains the only reliable way to check individual sensitivity.
Ghosted by Casper, 95 Causeyside Street, Paisley PA1 1TU — a short walk from Paisley Gilmour Street station.
If you’ve been putting off a colour change because a previous one went wrong, the consultation is free and there’s no obligation to book anything on the day. Bring your photos, and we’ll work out honestly whether it’s a one-appointment job or a plan.
