Halle Bailey's 'The Little Mermaid' Hair Carried a $150,000 Price Tag & Took Hours - Here's Why

Halle Bailey looks amazing in The Little Mermaid, but her hair carried a hefty price tag.

The 23-year-old actress and singer dyed her hair red to replicate Ariel’s signature look. However, she wanted to maintain her locs for the role.

The hairstylist behind engineering the look opened up about the process and why it cost approximately $150,000 and took upwards of 14 hours to complete.

Read more about Halle Bailey’s hair in The Little Mermaid…

Camille Friend did Halle‘s hair for the movie, and she opened up about the process in an interview with Variety.

While she was determined to maintain Halle‘s hair, she knew that a wig “just wasn’t going to work.”

“Halle’s locs are down to her waist, over 24 inches. And putting her in a wig was going to look crazy,” she explained.

Instead, she developed a process of wrapping red hair around her locs.

“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. We can change her color without changing her internal hair structure. Her structure and her hair are her,” she said.

The process was expensive: “I’m not guesstimating, but we probably spent at least $150,000 because we had to redo it and take it out. You couldn’t use it and we’d have to start again. It was a process.”

Once they nailed the process, they finessed it to make it work both underwater and once Ariel got her legs and took to the land!

Fans who are going to see The Little Mermaid in theaters might be wondering if they need to stick around for an end credits scene. They might also be wondering who plays a central character that is directly involved with Melissa McCarthy‘s Ursula.

Did you know that Jonah Hauer-King faced some stiff competition to nab the role of Prince Eric?