Marriage of digital art with real-world hair styling : Pixelated hair

February 1, 2015 1:54 PM

X-Presion, a cutting-edge (no pun intended) hair salon in Madrid, has pioneered an interesting new pixelated hair coloring technique that has the internet abuzz. Pixelated Hair Is The Newest Cutting-Edge Trend (Bored Panda)

Refinery 29, Rad Or Bad: Pixelated Hair - "It's exactly what it sounds like: dyeing sections of hair to simulate pixels on a screen. The best part is, the color possibilities are endless when it comes to achieving these choppy, block-like sections. Some girls add pops of red to their brown locks — others mix black with blonde."

BuzzFeed, The Latest Hair Trend Is To Make It Look Like Computer Pixels - "Ombre locks? 2014. Pastel grey hair? Totally last week, apparently. Hair stylists around the world are getting really into a new dye technique called 'xpresionpixel', which creates a pixelated effect on the hair."

Bit more info about how Revlon used it in an ad and the X-pression Group here: Pixelated Hair Dye Is A Thing Now And It's Almost Like No Other Hair Style Matters Anymore (Bustle)

On Twitter: #xpresionpixel

posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (36 comments total)

You know, in my head this was going to look awesome, in these pictures I find it considerably less impressive. Hair being hair, even when you've got it laying as straight and flat as you can, the "pixel" shape isn't turning out very impressively square, and I can't imagine it's going to look nearly as good in average use as it is when you're photographing it at the stylist. I'd be much more impressed if they'd managed to actually make it look like something, anyway. The effect of this is kind of more "I missed JPEG artifacts so much I wanted them in real life".
posted by Sequence at 2:03 PM on February 1, 2015 [9 favorites]

This will look great on the next crop of Hollywood Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Otherwise...
posted by umberto at 2:18 PM on February 1, 2015

What Sequence said. Was hoping for super awesome but it's pretty blah.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 2:19 PM on February 1, 2015

Low resolution and a refresh rate measured in weeks? No thank you, I'll wait for Full HD (Hair Dye).
posted by Cironian at 2:35 PM on February 1, 2015 [6 favorites]

It's when your hair starts to hiss that we've truly mastered the pixelation.
posted by nfalkner at 2:45 PM on February 1, 2015

I'm a guy and I kind of want to do this. I doubt my hair would support it though -- this looks like a style that only really works on straight hair, and my own is more like a cloud of hair probability.
posted by JHarris at 2:50 PM on February 1, 2015 [18 favorites]

I saw a woman in the train station the other day with dark red dyed pixelated hair and it looked pretty fantastic. All I can say is that it looked much cooler in person than it does in the pictures.
posted by skye.dancer at 3:00 PM on February 1, 2015 [5 favorites]

And I thought you couldn't make hair look worse than ombre.

Next up: chewing gum as hair accessories.
posted by charlie don't surf at 3:04 PM on February 1, 2015

The not so good photography is making it hard to judge how cool this looks in real life. I kind of like that the hair makes it looks more like glitch art than 8-bit, which makes it a bit more contemporary. The Revlon shot especially, with the eye makeup tied into the look, is really cool.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 3:07 PM on February 1, 2015 [5 favorites]

This will look great on the next crop of Hollywood Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Otherwise...

Surely you mean Manic Pixel Dream Girls...
posted by clawsoon at 3:12 PM on February 1, 2015 [19 favorites]

Coming soon: Pixelated bikini waxing.
posted by charlie don't surf at 3:29 PM on February 1, 2015 [2 favorites]

It looks neat, but you'd have to keep your hair absolutely perfect in order to get the effect you were looking for. That, with uneven growing patterns, makes me wonder how long this new style will be of interest.
posted by xingcat at 4:06 PM on February 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

The third picture in the Buzzfeed link. Is she posing with a mannequin, or is that an actual person?

I, too, wish to look like a rad futuristic mannequin/robot with piercings and shaggy rainbow synthetic hair.
posted by quiet earth at 4:14 PM on February 1, 2015

The idea is interesting, but the two that I've seen in real life just looked like unevenly dyed hair when the person was moving.
posted by betweenthebars at 4:27 PM on February 1, 2015

I liked the photos and would love to see how it looks in real life.

Pixelated bikini waxing.

I'm not going to go searching for it, but I have seen photos of exactly that. (Though as joked about above, the slow refresh rate might be an issue.)
posted by Dip Flash at 5:25 PM on February 1, 2015

The purple do in the first link is pretty cool.
posted by Mitheral at 6:23 PM on February 1, 2015

What are the minimum system requirements?
posted by srboisvert at 6:54 PM on February 1, 2015

Yeah, I also came into say that I'm not sure what I was imagining, but in my imagination it was way better. But now that I hear it's cooler when you see it in real life, I want to see it in real life. Or maybe at least a video?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:24 PM on February 1, 2015

And I thought you couldn't make hair look worse than ombre.

That's not ombre. That's dark roots.

I think these pixel styles look really cool, but I didn't have any expectations before I clicked. I love most hair dye though - I recently asked my hairdresser if she could theoretically do a pastel gray for me, mostly because I knew she'd be horrified (she's not the person to see for trendy color) but also partly because I thought it might be fun to go gray all once, rather than hair by hair by hair.
posted by Squeak Attack at 7:35 PM on February 1, 2015 [3 favorites]

“The hair on the barista was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
posted by rebent at 7:53 PM on February 1, 2015 [14 favorites]

well I have some freshly-bleached straight hair just begging for a funky dye job - how is this done???
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 8:00 PM on February 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think it looks nice :)
posted by wats at 9:22 PM on February 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

I had a red and blue chessboard dye job once. My brother painted the dye on with a paintbrush. For some reason I never got any pics of it, but it was pretty cool. This was with very short cropped hair, though, so it was a lot easier to get sharp edges on it. This looks OK, but I wouldn't call it "pixelated".
posted by lkc at 9:42 PM on February 1, 2015

Kids these days have the coolest hair. It's wonderful to see. In my day we had to drive to Chicago to get Manic Panic or color our hair with magic markers. It was a simpler and less fabulous time.
posted by stet at 10:16 PM on February 1, 2015 [6 favorites]

I go out of my way to dye my hair crazy mixes of colors. I am tempted by this, but in the end I wouldn't do it, because the moment you moved your head that pixelated effect would vanish.
posted by rednikki at 10:57 PM on February 1, 2015

well I have some freshly-bleached straight hair just begging for a funky dye job - how is this done???

I'm going to guess using stencils of some sort, maybe multilayered thick aluminum foil and electrical tape or something else that is not so gummy it'd get all stuck. Something like how they wrap highlights only the wrapping gets used as the stencil?
posted by mcrandello at 11:19 PM on February 1, 2015

yea I was thinking of covering a few patches of hair with masking tape, and painting on the dye around it, so the hair would be mostly blue with blonde "pixels". Maybe that will work
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 11:28 PM on February 1, 2015

I'm surprised that this is lacking a "cyberpunk" tag.
posted by I-baLL at 1:37 AM on February 2, 2015

Is this something I'd have to have hair to understand?

I guess I would kind of be at an advantage here - a nice smooth surface would get sharp lines and no growth to worry about the pixels becoming jagged ;-)
posted by dg at 2:50 AM on February 2, 2015

I'd like to try this, my hair is short and straight so I think it has a chance of working. I like the more glitchy effect too. Retro is nice but vintage styles rarely work for me :)
posted by harriet vane at 3:10 AM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

“The hair on the barista was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Blue?
posted by Merzbau at 4:54 AM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, this is essentially what happens when I fuck up the bleach job, just slightly more even when your hair is perfectly straightened and does not move at any point.

I like it, but it just turns into a mess of colour in like five minutes, doesn't it?
posted by Katemonkey at 5:00 AM on February 2, 2015

I-baLL: "I'm surprised that this is lacking a "cyberpunk" tag.
"

No kidding. Life in a Gibson novel is at the same time more and less interesting than I thought.
posted by signal at 5:27 AM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

harriet vane - if you try this links to pictures is obligatory!
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:19 AM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

I wonder how long the lines would look straight enough for the effect to hold. I imagine that eventually it'd end up look like some kind of camouflage pattern/dappled sunlight, though after a long awkward period of looking like a recognisable pixellated style, only wonky and a bit shit.
posted by acb at 1:09 PM on February 2, 2015

Not even an option for those of us with curls.
posted by polymath at 9:06 PM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]