DEATH BECOMES HAIR

The life of a celebrity hairdresser typically includes lots of shmoozing, lots of hair spray, perhaps a brand ambassadorship or two. Fabio Sementilli’s Los Angeles life featured all of that plus a seemingly loving family, until it came to a violent end—with his wife on trial for murder.

- BY JESSE HYDE

In the early years, before the Porsche in the driveway, the pool in the back yard, and the gated house in the hills, there was hair. There had always been hair. Big hair, fabulous hair, bold hair—hair to cut and perm and color and style, often under a big cloud of hair spray.

In those years, the ’80s, when Fabio Sementilli styled his own hair to look like the boys in Duran Duran (big and savage and a little ridiculous), he and his sister Mirella owned a salon in downtown Toronto. Mirella liked to joke that they wound so many perms they had dents in their fingers from the perm rods. But where they really made a name for themselves was on the international hair show circuit—intense competitions where, in 17 minutes, you had to complete your look from the stage in places like Las Vegas and New York and Miami.

Within this world Fabio became a star. He would sometimes compete in a Scottish kilt, and when the famous came to Toronto, where he and Mirella had grown up, they'd hire Fabio. He did the hair of J.Lo and Russell Crowe and Jackie Chan, and kids at school told Luigi, his son from his first marriage, that they had seen Fabio on TV, talking about hair.

“We have a lot of flamboyant characters in our industry, but he really was just like nobody else,” the fashion and beauty journalist Maggie Mulhern, who often judged hair shows Fabio competed in, told me. “We all wear black all the time in our industry, and he would always wear color.”

Fabio had never wanted to leave Toronto, but Wella, one of the largest salon color companies in the world, came calling in 2007, and after three years he was promoted to creative director for Wella North America, which meant moving his family to Los Angeles. By 2013 he was the company’s VP of education.

They bought a house in Woodland Hills, a posh area of L.A. Then came the Porsche, and long afternoons out by the pool, where Fabio would take calls and smoke cigars.