Serbian Barber Trims Celebrity Portraits on Customers' Heads

Serbian Barber Trims Celebrity Portraits on Customers’ Heads

By Spooky on September 5th, 2017 Category: Art

Mario Hvala, a barber from Novi Sad, Serbia, recently made international headlines for trimming a detailed portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on the back of a client’s head, but that was only his most recent achievement. He has been creating “hair tattoos” for the last eight years, and there’s nothing he can’t trim on the scalps of his customers.

33-year-old Mario claims he started doing hair tattoos eight years ago, while working in Slovenia. A customer had asked him for two straight lines on his head, but the hairstylist was feeling adventurous, so he proposed a more intricate design, and the guy went home with a tarantula design on his head. Inspired by the success of his first attempt, Hvala kept honing his skills, and upon his return to Serbia, four years ago, he quickly made a name fr himself at the House Damian hair salon, in Novi Sad, carving all kinds of design and celebrity portraits on customers’ heads.

Photo: House of Damian/Facebook

In the last few years, Mario Hvala has made national headlines several times, for creating a variety of intricate hair tattoos, like portraits of legendary inventor Nikola Tesla, tennis ace Novak Djokovic and even politicians like Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vucic. But it was his latest work, a detailed hair portrait of a smiling Kim Jong Un that finally got him worldwide attention. His masterpiece was featured by popular websites like the Huffington Post and Unilad, and a video of the work in progress recently went viral on Facebook.

Photo: House of Damian/Facebook

In an interview with Tattoo Club Srbija, Mario Hvala said that he takes between 3 and 5 hours to complete one of his intricate hair portraits, using scissors and razors, but also spends a lot of time planning the design, and figuring out the best place on the head to put it. People’s heads are always different, and he has to find the flattest area so that the portraits don’t look too distorted.

Photo: House of Damian/Facebook

There’s no place for mistakes when executing a hair tattoo, so before he starts trimming hair, Mario Hvala executes the design on a piece of paper several times, to ensure that he gets all the details just right. He then frames the portrait on the back of the client’s head with a trimmer, and starts working on the design with scissors and razors. The longest he has had to work on a design was eight hours, and Mario claims that he has never made any mistakes.

Photo: House Damian/Facebook

Considering that the average person’s hair grows about 1.5 cm per month, Mario Hvala says that his designs start to lose definition after 8 to 10 days. But that doesn’t stop people from paying 120 euros for a detailed portrait.

Photo: House of Damian/Facebook

Mario Hvala is not the world’s only hair tattoo artist. Three years ago, Rob Ferrell, a talented San Antonio barber made news headlines for his intricate hair portraits as well.