Jonal Chong Hair Couture and Nicole Kidman

The bad English copy on this print ad promoting a Jonal Chong Hair Couture caught my attention recently.

The owner of the salon, Jonal Chong, claimed in the ad that he has worked with “Hollywood big names like Nicole Kidman, Katherine Heigel  (sic) and Hugh Grant”. The article also stated that “Nicole Kidman, one of the most glamorous women in the world, even appointed Jonal Chong, the man who has been running his hands through her hair for the last 3 years, as her hairstylist.”

Wow!

There’s a stylist who is even more elite than David Gan in Singapore and this is the first time I have read about him? What a frog I am, living in my tiny well!

My curiosity was piqued. Hence I did an online search to find out more about this amazing Jonal Chong.

The first site I visited was the official website for Jonal Chong Hair Couture. There were no claims on Jonal Chong being Nicole Kidman’s stylist on the website. In fact, there was not much text on the website, except for a short description on how Jonal Chong Hair Couture “has had the greatest influence on the world of hair.”

On the website landing page, one is greeted by a picture of Nicole Kidman with a line of text saying “To Jonal Chong Hair Couture all the best“, followed by what looks like her autograph:

If Jonal Chong has done so much styling for Nicole Kidman, he must have lots of photos with her don’t you think?

After all, David Gan has lots of up-close-and-personal shots of himself with all the famous international celebrities he had worked with.

I only managed to find only one picture of Jonal with Nicole Kidman under the  “international” photo gallery page. Fishy:

The shadow on Jonal’s head looks very unnatural in that one single image. I did a reverse image search on Tineye. Guess what? Check out the double take below:

Which do you think is the original image? Jonal’s or the other dude’s?

A quick search on Jonal Chong and and his salon turned up lots of complaints and angry web posts on alleged poor services (Complaints 1, Complaints 2 [comments below the article], Complaints 3).

Were these customers drawn to his salon by his Nicole Kidman-affiliation?

I do not know Jonal Chong and have never met him or visited his saloon before. This is not a personal vendetta against him or his salon. However, when I chance upon something fishy, it is in my nature to investigate and share my findings.

To add on, I did a search on Nicole Kidman’s signature and the image results via Google mostly returned images of two variants – one with”Nicole Kid” visible with long end and start strokes on the letters “N”, “K” and “d”; the other with a long middle stroke over what look’s like an abbreviation of her name. None matched the straight-forward and clearly legible full name version seen on Jonal Chong’s website:

To be fair to Jonal Chong, I also ran Tineye’s reverse image search on the rest of his pictures taken with celebrities at the Golden Globe Award 2007 – those did not return any results.  However, they did not look like intimate shots of well-acquainted individuals and look more like the typical celebrity groupie shots to me.

Alarm bells?

I will leave it for you to decide.

Everything cited and posted in this blog entry is available to the worldwide audience via the Internet (sans for the newspaper ad which I scanned). All I did was just piece all the information in one place for comparison.

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