Disney spared no expense when it came to transforming Halle Bailey into a real-life princess Ariel. The actress’s transformation of her beautiful locs in The Little Mermaid, cost a whopping $150,000.
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“I’m not guesstimating, but we probably spent at least $150,000 because we had to redo it and take it out,” Camille Friend, a hairstylist who worked on the new live-action version the classic Disney move, told Variety in a recently published interview. “You couldn’t use it, and we’d have to start again. It was a process.”
The movie stayed true to Ariel’s signature thick red hair by using “three shades of red” on Bailey in addition to adding hair extensions that were “30-inches long and fused in with Keratin tips.”
Friend told the popular entertainment magazine that it was important to ensure that Bailey was able to maintain the style of her natural hair, in addition to protecting its integrity. How did they do that? Well, by wrapping hair around Bailey’s natural hair, which, at the time, was over 24-inches long.
“If we take hair and wrap it around her locs, we don’t have to cut them and we don’t have to color them,” Camille explained the process of protecting Bailey’s hair. “We can change her color without changing her internal hair structure. Her structure and her hair are her.”
Bailey could not have been happier with the results as she locs are indeed as Friend said, a part of the singer/songwriter’s being.
The 23-year-old herself confirmed just how important her hair is to her in the May 2023 Ebony Magazine cover interview.
“I’ve had my locs since I was 5, so they’re a huge part of who I am,” she told Ebony. “We need to be able to see ourselves, we need to be able to see our hair on big screens like this, so that we know that it’s beautiful and more than acceptable.”
The Little Mermaid is now showing in theaters.
Photo Credit(s)/Featured Image: Disney
