The new Supershine Smoothing Wax Stick from a brand with more music history than most labels.
There is a quote that follows the Oribe brand around like a signature fragrance. It comes from Cindy Crawford, one of the supermodels whose hair Oribe Canales styled at the peak of his career, at the peak of hers, at the peak of an era that nobody has quite managed to replicate since.
If hairdressers were rock stars, Oribe would have been the biggest rock star of them all. I started working with Oribe in the late 80s and early 90s, at the beginning of both our careers. We worked together several times a week on shoots from Vogue to Versace.
It is not hyperbole. It is just accurate.
Oribe Canales was born in Cuba in 1956 and immigrated to the United States as a child. By his mid twenties he was building an editorial career styling hair for the covers of the most prominent fashion magazines in the world. By the late 1980s he had opened his own salon in one of the hottest stores in New York, launched an agency representing artists including François Nars, Laura Mercier and Bobbi Brown, and begun working with photographer Steven Meisel and makeup artist François Nars in a creative partnership that would define beauty for an entire decade and lead directly to the creation of the Big Six supermodels.
Then Gianni Versace called. The two became inseparable throughout the 90s, working together on shoots, ad campaigns and runway shows across Europe and America. Oribe became one of the first American hairdressers to work so prolifically in Europe because Versace brought him everywhere. The big, iconic, unapologetically glamorous hair that sat on the heads of Cindy, Linda, Naomi, Claudia and Christy as they walked to music that still sounds extraordinary thirty years later. That was Oribe.
In 1992 he created hair looks for the reopening of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The same institution that hosts the Met Gala every year. He was there at the beginning of fashion’s most famous night, making the hair that the cameras pointed at.
Then Jennifer Lopez called. She had spent her teens studying his work in Vogue and when she was about to release her debut album she wanted him. He began working with her in 1996, starting with the cover of On the 6, and they collaborated for years. The hair that became synonymous with one of the most significant pop careers of that era was his.
Along the way Karl Lagerfeld, his friend and collaborator, suggested he design his first product bottles to look like dishwashing detergent. Only Lagerfeld. Only the 90s. Only this particular world where the biggest names in fashion were discussing luxury pomade packaging over dinner.
He was not a hairdresser who happened to be in the room when culture was happening. He was part of why culture looked and sounded the way it did.
In 2008 he co-founded Oribe Hair Care with Daniel Kaner, a luxury hair brand built on the belief that professional performance and genuine craftsmanship are not mutually exclusive. He styled his last fashion show in 2018, a circus themed Moschino resort collection for Jeremy Scott, crafting teased looks that made the most of the brand’s iconic Dry Texturizing Spray. He died that same year in Miami.
Sarah Jessica Parker had presented him with the Visionnaire award at Intercoiffure in 2011. She knew, as everyone in that world knew, exactly what he had built and what it meant.
The brand carries his intelligence and his standard in every product it makes.
Which brings us to the Supershine Smoothing Wax Stick, launched in March 2026 and already the most talked about new hair product of the year. It is buildable, flexible, nourishing and genuinely works. Castor seed oil and a cranberry complex deliver hold without stiffness, shine without greasiness, control without the morning after nightmare of washing heavy wax out of your hair. Marie Claire called it the only wax stick that keeps baby hairs in place all day. Having used it, that is not an overstatement.
It comes in the signature Oribe packaging, the kind of object you leave on your bathroom shelf deliberately rather than hiding in a drawer. The fragrance alone, that distinctive Côte d’Azur signature the brand puts in everything, is worth the price of entry.
The slick back. The sleek ponytail. The sculpted updo. The tamed flyaways on a blowout that took forty minutes and deserves to last. This is the product for all of those moments, made by a brand that has been in the room when the most beautiful hair in the world happened, from Versace’s runway to Jennifer Lopez’s album cover to the reopening of the Costume Institute at the Met.
If hairdressers were rock stars, Oribe would have been the biggest. This is what he left behind.
Shop the Oribe Supershine Smoothing Wax Stick at oribe.com, Sephora, Cult Beauty and Nordstrom.