This New Hair Coloring Technique Is Actually an Artistic Masterpiece

If you're still getting your hair colored with your basic dye and foil strips, girl it is sotime to update. From your classic balayage to the more recent fluid hair painting trend, it seems like more and more dye styles are cropping up for an entirely new and epic effect. And now we have one more to add to the list and it looks like something straight off of a canvas.

It's called hand-pressed coloring and we totes believe this would have been Picasso's coloring method if he was a hairstylist. Yeah, it's that cool.

Quite literally dreamed up back in September by Redken colorist Chiali Marvici, the technique is similar to both screen printing and painting a work of art.

As for her inspiration, Chiala told Cosmo, "I have a painting in my apartment that a friend did for me a while ago that has a lot of colors on it, and I fell asleep one night and dreamt of all these layers living together on a surface. When I woke up, I thought about how beautiful that would be on the hair and how I would translate that vision onto the hair."

#Styleinspo at it's finest, ladies. When Chiala finally figured out how to transform her friend's painting into hair coloring patterns, it was nowhere short of a masterpiece. In order to transfer the color onto hair, Chiala says you have to first paint different patterns like circles, diagonal lines and swirls with hair coloring onto a 6-inch wide sheet of hard plexiglass. All of these shapes can be varying in color based on what the client wants.

Once your plexiglass painting is finished, Chiala takes the hair and lays it flat on the plexiglass, pressing a 6-inch long putty knife along the strands so the color saturates both the top and underside of the hair. And when she's done running the putty knife through your hair, all of the shapes blend together to form a blanket of color.

And it looks incredible.

Chiala then slides the plexiglass slab out from under your hair, repaints the pattern and does it again until your whole head is covered in color. Letting the color set takes anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, making the waiting time for you significantly less than getting foils or balayage because hand-pressed coloring doesn't take any post-application blending.

Right now, this technique isn't as widespread as we'd like but Chiala says she will soon be traveling around the country to teach more colorists how to do hand-pressed painting themselves. But until then, we'll have fun drawing our stylists some blueprints for the color combos we'd like in our hair. Galaxy ombre, here we come!