Salma Hayek Puts Mascara In Her Hair (No, Seriously) — See Video

If you were anything like me as a teen, you were proudly quirky and didn’t want to follow all of the conventional beauty rules, but you never really committed to anything considered too rebellious. For example, I would’ve loved to dye a streak of my hair blue, but instead, I used blue “hair mascara” to get a half-assed version of the look for a day. (It was the ‘90s, OK? Fantasy colors weren’t having a mainstream moment yet.) Now that I’m decidedly middle-aged, I figured putting mascara in my hair was in my pre-Y2K past, but it turns out Salma Hayek has a clever use for those of us who haven’t been teenagers in a while.

Hayek has made it perfectly clear on several occasions that she’s a fan of the grays she’s been getting in recent years, referring to them as “white hair of wisdom.” But she knows it’s nice to have options, so she sometimes colors them — and not in the most traditional ways. On Tuesday, February 27, she posted a Reel to Instagram in which she shares one of her unexpected techniques for temporarily concealing her high-contrast silver streaks.

“So what is the secret? How can you cover it sometimes without having to dye it?” she says mid-glam-session, wearing a white robe. “So when I’m on my own, I just put mascara. You clean it really well and then just go like this,” she explains as she mimics brushing what appears to be Charlotte Tilbury Pillow Talk Push Up Lashes mascara over her grays. “And all the rebellious little ones that stick up not only go black, but they stay flat.”

Now, the reason she didn’t actually apply it in this case is because her hairstylist, Miguel Martin Perez, was standing by with L’Oréal Professionnel Hair Touch Up — basically hair makeup in a can. And considering that the mascara trick really only works for very dark hair like Hayek’s, it’s good to know that this option comes in a wide variety of natural-looking colors (as does its drugstore cousin L’Oreál Paris Magic Root Cover Up).