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Finger Painting Haircolor: Curly Prisms

For my curly sisters out there, here is a post about prismatic hair color and curls……I had been wanting to paint rainbows into curly hair for quite a while now. I wanted to see what it would look like to hide some little prisms within the wild texture of natural curls.

During the Summer, I went to a little Island called Lopez to take a Flower Magic essences and arranging workshop. While I was there, I met a flower farmer named Lindsey who taught us how to arrange flowers and make beautiful flower crowns. I remembered how she had mentioned wanting some rainbow color in her gorgeous, thick natural curls.

I posted something on Instagram about wanting to paint some curly rainbows, and she responded. Within a week, she was in the chair getting her hair finger painted with little rainbows and chatting with me about flowers and grandmas and Island life.

My intentions for her haircolor were to add some brightness and some color to her hair in this grayest time of year, to hold her over until her flowers began to bloom. Also, I wanted something that would be subtle enough to grow out without any fuss, and not scare her grandmother.

I wanted to show her some simple color skills to bring to the Island to share with her friends should they ever want rainbows too…..You just never know when someone is going to want a rainbow in their hair! And all you need to do ’em is veggie dye in primary colors ( I use Manic Panic) and bleach ( I use 40 developer generally for lightening bits of natural hair.

Here is how I did it…….I first mixed bleach and 40 volume developer in a plastic bowl, with a large paint brush. Then, I randomly painted the bleach onto individual curls, working and saturating it into the ends and softly feathering the color up the strand for a seamless transition. I let her sit for about 45 minutes with the bleach in her hair, then rinsed and washed her hair. I had her rough-dry it while I finished up Elke’s rainbows (from last week;)

Then, I worked through her hair to find the lighter pieces and then I used my fingers to paint the colors in, blending each shade into the next down the strands of lightened hair. I wasn’t too picky about it. I wanted some rainbows to bleed into her natural hair too, so as to add more dimension and tone. She sat for a half hour or so, and then I rinsed her out. As her hair dried, we marveled at the pretty colors popping into the light. Her hair came alive, even in the less-than-ideal low light of sundown. Can’t wait to see her rainbows in the sun!

Thanks for stopping by! If you are curly, I hope you never feel excluded from the fun of rainbow hair.

xoxo, HTHG

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