Colorist Ursula Goff Paints Famous Paintings onto Hair Extensions

Some makeup artists and hair colorists take inspiration from food or Prince Harry's cheeks. (We're looking at you, Terry Barber.) Others look to good old fashioned museum-level artwork. Kansas–based hair colorist Ursula Goff turns hair extensions into recreations of classic art pieces, like Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe and Edvard Munch's The Scream, painting them directly onto the hair with dyes.

"I thought of [creating these looks] while I was washing a client's hair," Goff tells Allure. "We had pulled her color palette from Starry Night, and I started wondering while I looked at the colors in the shampoo bowl, how hard it would be to do the actual painting on hair. And since I have painted for much of my life, the concept appealed to me as an excuse to do more artwork."

Last year, Goff gained attention for her Fine Art series. Instead of creating exact replicas of the paintings, she took inspiration from their color palettes. For example, she dyed someone's hair varying shades of blue and green to resemble Claude Monet's Water Lilies.

But back to the hair extensions — Goff started the series off with Starry Night. She decided to execute the look on a separate strip of hair not attached to an an actual head for logistical reasons. "For [the art] to lay properly on someone's natural hair, I'd have to basically paint the hair in its natural vertical position, which is not comfortable for me or the client," she explains. "They wouldn't really ever be able move the entire time I worked on it." Plus, the extensions help preserve the look since they aren't washed as regularly as the hair on our heads. "The [hair paintings] are too time consuming," she adds. "And I am too attached to them to just let them go down the drain in a very literal sense!"

For all the looks, she uses hair dye from lines like Manic Panic, Arctic Fox, Pravana, and Kenra. Usually she likes to water them down a bit before applying them to blonde hair with a paint brush. Everything is done freehand, too — she doesn't use any stencils or projectors. Instead, she traces out the painting on a piece of paper and lays it under the hair.

The Starry Night look took almost 10 hours for her to create, by far the hardest one to do. Reproducing the brush strokes on the hair was difficult because of its texture. She had to scale them down to fit the hair. The color scheme also proved to be a problem. "The light tones just meant I had to plan out the colors of the dyes really well because it can be tough to 'undo' hair color if it's too dark, especially in very specific sizes and shapes like that particular painting has," she says. She ended up redoing the whole thing about three times. By the time she felt satisfied with it, she already recreated Kandinsky's Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles on another strip of extensions. This one, like most of her looks, took only a couple hours.

The Scream was another one that took more time than usual.

Goff also tried her hand at some Roy Lichtenstein.

She's even tried painting dye directly onto someone's buzz cut using the same technique we've seen with leopard and pizza hair.

TBH Ursula Goff needs to change her Instagram bio to say "hair artist." If you ask us, all of these belong in some kind of hair museum. We'd be the first in line for her exhibit.

More creative hair coloring you'll love:

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2. The “Shine Line” Trend Is Like Rainbow Highlighter for Your Hair
3. The Mother-of-Pearl Hair Trend Is Like Holographic Hair for Mermaids

Now, see some of the most iconic hair looks from Cannes: