Incredible Braided Hairstyles (34 pics)
Alejandro is a totally self-taught artist. In middle school, he started watching videos on how to do a fishtail braid. Then he got into a cosmetology school and braiding became his favorite thing to do in his downtime. For his 19th birthday, he only asked his mom to buy him a wig and that was actually the start of his more intricate work. After being at school for 10 hours he would then go home to braid on his wig.
The young stylist found the biggest inspiration in the work of recognized masters.
In his interview, Alejandro admitted that the hairstyling genius he’d always wanted to take after was Guy Tang , a hair superstar who documents his journey on Instagram and Youtube. Alejandro confessed that he loves the vivid colors and the braids that the stylist does, and he would watch his videos with his mouth open, wondering if he would be able to learn how to create such a sculpted beauty.
The first awards and recognition were not slow in coming.
Alejandro takes special pride in his dreamcatcher-inspired hairstyles, which were reposted to the official channel of Instagram and got over 1,000,000 likes. Recently, he also won first place and a $5,000 prize in the Pulp Riot Christmas competition with his winter-roses-inspired look.
As with any art, doing hairstyles has plenty of challenges and bottlenecks.
The biggest difficulty that Alejandro faces is making sure that his work is original and fresh. He wants to stand out from the crowd so he spends hours thinking about concept ideas using unusual materials in his braiding. Creating these looks can take him anywhere from 2 to 7 hours, and there have been many times when he has worked on something for a very long time, just to then take it all down because he ended up not liking it.
Bonus: Meet Alejandro in person, rocking his incredible ginger mane.
