From new-wave flappers to punk-rock Asian cowgirls, all kinds of fantasies were being lived out through the new hairstyles on offer at the recent Allied Beauty Association event.

The annual happening, in which international hair companies converge on the Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre to show their stuff to local stylists, acts as a one-stop course on all that is hot and happening in the field. (This year's ran May 16 and 17.)

At the Schwarzkopf Professional stage, a key look was that flapper cut in a pure Debbie Harry platinum. "We want a pearly blond with almost no gold in it," instructed the design team's Christie Stoll. "We give it that tone with a kick of violet. You want it to look slightly silvery." The bob was punched up with a hard, modern edge thanks to slanted, chopped-out bangs.

Schwarzkopf was also one of the companies showing long, straight looks with a heavy fringe over the eyes. Dubbing their style the Rhinestone, the platform artists featured an Asian model with a jolt of electric blue beneath her shiny black mane. "Think of it as cowgirl chic: in fashion, there's more leather and denim, but it's definitely glammed up," explained Stoll. To achieve the blue hue, the team used a new salon product called Action Paint, punky neon dye that the client can continue to massage into hair at home to retain the intense shade.

That colour-injected cut found a slightly different interpretation over at the Matrix stage, where another Asian model's thick bangs reached to her eyelashes and were dyed in a solid scarlet patch; two matching red ribbons of colour sliced down the sides of her long, jet hair. Over at Farouk Systems USA, an Asian woman had thick stripes of vibrant pumpkin-orange streaking through poker-straight locks. Beside her, another model's pure-white mane had been given a lilac underlayer. And all across the floor of the trade centre, one of the best places to trend-watch, droves of visiting stylists looked like either the long-lost offspring of Terri Nunn or wannabe Xtinas, wearing shoulder blade ­reaching platinum hair over a stark, rock 'n' roll underlayer of black.

Not all of these new long, linear styles came in such radical colour contrasts. At Paul Mitchell's stage, another ironed version had an almost solid-brown shade; visual interest came from the fact that the hair descended in a geometrically perfect diagonal on either side of the face.

The quest for these ever-straighter, -smoother locks met with an explosion of new tools to tame manes. In product booths, hairdressers were snapping up ceramic hot irons (which allow hotter, more effective straightening without harm to the hair than metal renditions) and ionic hair dryers (which use negative-ion energy to bust water-molecule clusters, supposedly drying and even restoring hair with less damage than regular machines). If you can get your paws on these high-tech new toys, expect them to set you back up to $200 retail.

But styles reaching down well past the shoulders were by no means the only options at the event. Matrix design-team member Diana Ferreira showed a crop that was among many new spins on the mod look. A model in a Pucci-style print dress had the front of her hair left long and bangless, while the back was chopped out to be spiky and short. Elsewhere, at Farouk, stylist Woody Michleb showed off a female fauxhawk, smattered with tones of rich brown.

That fauxhawk--first mainstreamed by those hobbit dudes at March's Oscar ceremonies--also proved to be a strong trend for men. Wella featured one South Asian model with a rich cherry-red rendition. Meanwhile, L'Oréal Professional flashed back to the androgynous '80s with a different men's look: a pale, Gary Numan look-alike had a block of ash blond cutting diagonally down the longer side of his asymmetrical, midnight-black crop.

But don't sweat it, guys: you don't have to give up your day job and enlist in the two-boy army to have hip hair. At Schwarzkopf, Stoll's male model wore a cool textured crop in solid brown, slightly longer on top and in the back (subtle shades of that fauxhawk); it was a 'do that would move more easily from the office cubicle to the clubs. "Men's hair really follows fashion, with a lot more casual, relaxed, deconstructed looks," Stoll summed up. As with the women's cuts, you could go mean and extreme or tone down the same idea into a subtler look. But why hold back when such an unprecedented number of styles this year give the great big go-ahead to living dangerously?