How To Give a Kid Leopard Hair
Forest decided that he wanted leopard hair after we buzzed it short the other day. Some moms might think I'm nuts to agree to such an outlandish request, let alone be the hairdresser for this wild event. But in my opinion, there are way worse things a teenager could be interested in than crazy hair. Following is the step by step process I used to transform Forest's hair into leopard fur.
First,we shaved and bleached his hair. You can't paint spots on long hair. Forest has incredibly dark hair, like mine, so the bleach doesn't go platinum on the first round, but since we are doing leopard spots, it doesn't really need to go platinum. The lighter blonde you go, the more contrast the spots will have in the end, but that doesn't always look awesome. Sometimes slightly subtle is a better look. Also, adding spots has the magical effect of making the yellowness disappear.
Creating convincing leopard spots means that you better have something to look at while painting, unless you've done this five hundred times (as I have). To make Forest feel safe, I had a faux fur leopard blanket handy. But I didn't look at it. You also need two shades of hair color: A nice dark brown or red-brown, and a copper penny red. Basically, I just look at the hair swatches at the beauty supply and choose two that will look nice together. I've done this hair-do so many times, never using the same colors twice, and it always comes out awesome.
I started at the sideburns and made the spots as small as I could using a little craft paintbrush. I used a round brush that I cut really short. I made spots by painting three or four blobs arranged in a rosette pattern, with a hole more or less in the center. I used the brown color first, and tried to keep the spots looking natural and random, but not too random.
Next I mixed the red color and filled in the center of the dark spots.
Almost done!
And here is the leopard boy, freshly rinsed:
