Riot of color: Vibrant hair colors are trending in Baton Rouge

TREND WATCH: Hair art: Colors known as “vivids” have grown in popularity recently. Shades inspired by mystical creatures like unicorns and mermaids—or even the pigmented swirls of a geode—are taking off, as seen in these designs by local stylist Lindsay Racca.

With arms full of ink and silvery-lavender hair, Lindsay Racca has the spark of a punk rocker gone professional—and the colors coming out of her salon are just as bold.

Racca started coloring hair for herself and her friends at 14 and quickly found a talent for it. Since then, the 27-year-old has made a career of transforming her clients’ hair. She does traditional coloring, but what she gravitates toward most is unicorn-like jewel tones and pastels.

“I’ve always been drawn to color. I’m a natural painter; I’ve been an acrylic painter literally since grade school. So [the color work] I do is the most visually stimulating part of hair for me,” says Racca. “There are so many different ways you can intermix them, working with lights and darks, contrasting colors to make a color pop.”

Racca now owns Vivid Studio, an indie studio operating out of the collaborative Sola Salons cosmetic workspace on Perkins Road, where she might spend upward of eight hours with a client. Though vibrant colors have a bad reputation for frying natural hair, Racca has spent years honing her skills and finding the perfect products—like her occasional collaborator, dye company Pulp Riot—to create looks that are striking and colorful but also keep hair healthy and last through 50-plus washes.

She works with her clients from start to finish, even sometimes sending them home for weeks of rehabilitation and repair treatment on their current hair before she’ll go near it with a strong dye. An all-over, full-color look can take six to eight hours of work for undyed hair and at least two sessions for hair that’s already colored. But it all helps build a bond with her clients, who trust her enough to take them from natural shades to purples, greens, blues, pinks and beyond.

“We’ll start slow. We’ll add just a piece, or something underneath, and see if you like it,” Racca says. “And then nine out of 10 times, they absolutely love it, and then they go crazy and usually end up doing the majority of their head.”

Find Lindsay Racca on Facebook or follow her Instagram, @hairbylindsayracca.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.