Article courtesy of modelsblog.info
Supermodel Agyness Deyn may have one of the most intriguing names in showbusiness, but she has always maintained a mystique about its origins.
Did her mother simply dream up the unconventional spelling, or was it inspired by a belief in the power of numerology?
Now a New Age guru has come forward to reveal he was responsible for giving plain old Laura Hollins her glamorous and successful new moniker – using methods much more bizarre than anyone ever speculated.
Laurence Y Payg, who claims to be Britain’s only professional name analyst, ‘reads’ people’s names using a 3,000-year-old Chinese technique.
He does much of his work by post from his Manchester home, suggesting changes based on a client’s date of birth and full legal name.
Deyn arranged for him to visit her family home after reading about his work – and he has since given the model’s mother and sister new names, too.
‘Agyness really wanted to be a successful model,’ said 59-year-old Payg, who was born Laurence David Adams and has changed his own name three times.
‘There wasn’t a lot of success ahead for her if she carried on as Laura Hollins, so she needed a name that would enhance her career.’
Payg stresses that his technique – summarized in the panel below – is not numerology, as it uses a different method to assign a numerical value to each name, which he says reflects a person’s ‘personality, virtues, vices and health’.
He also says that each individual letter can influence someone’s life. The letters G, Y, P, D and O are considered positive – notice the Ys and Gs in both his and Agyness’s name – while B, F, W, U, X and H are negative.
Deyn had already signed with London agency Models 1 when she met Payg, but it was only after she changed her name that her career really took off.
‘When I first met her, Agyness was entering a three-year period of losses, as indicated by the U in Laura, and her names didn’t work well together,’ Payg said.
‘Lauras can be childlike, they’re naturally inquisitive and might love dressing up, as this Laura did, but coupled with Hollins, it was never going to work.’
He was troubled by the H at the start of her surname, which he reckoned would bring eight years of strain and stress from the age of 35.