Princess Diana’s Royal Cosmetic Chemist Shares the Details Behind Her Custom-Made Hairspray

Princess Diana’s iconic style is forever in fashion and now the world can get an inside look at her very bespoke beauty musts.

“I worked really closely with her and her hairdresser [Richard Dalton] at the time,” cosmetic chemist Sheree Ladove Funsch told Page Six. “When she would get off the helicopter, the blades would just spin and spin and her hair [would blow]. So her beautiful coiffed, cute little cut would go crazy.”

The solution, the cosmetic chemist shares: A custom-made hairspray that Princess Diana requested had a “firm hold that appeared soft.” The princess-approved product would come to be known as the “Helicopter Hairspray.”

“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 … a helmet-head kind of look.”

Ladove Funsch shares that the product took a few iterations to get just right—and, of course, they had to take the tiara into account.

“I was literally in [the lab] formulating myself, figuring out what’s the melting point of this resin, how do we get it so that it’s not so sticky and tacky? How do we get it so that it doesn’t harden? It’s just a whole creative recipe.

There were two versions. There was the helicopter and then there was the jewel version. Because when she would wear a tiara, you’re talking about millions and millions of dollars of jewels on her head,” she says of her decision to strip the ‘Tiara Hairspray’ of ingredients that would leave a residue on diamonds. 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.”