What color is marinettes hair

//spottedcutie.tumblr.com/post/187554250399/marinettes-hair-is-black-with-blue-highlights

I’ve been debating this with a handful of people on my recent quiz and ultimately decided to just make one post to say it all.

Now, I understand why people think her hair is blue. There are a number of shots where it looks like it is, which I will address in a moment. But first off, Thomas Astruc himself has weighed in on the issue, and this is what he said:

There you have it, straight from the creator’s mouth. Marinette’s hair is intended to be black. The blue “reflections” are a stylistic decision made as an homage to superhero comics, such as the example he provided above.

So then, if her hair’s supposed to be black, what about those aforementioned screencaps where it looks completely blue?

The answer is actually quite simple: it’s 3D animation.

It’s easy to use a distinct highlight color in 2D. Simply paint that color on top of the base. 3D doesn’t work like that, however. To get color on a 3D model, you have to paint a texture map that gets projected onto the geo. The textures can have inflections and detail, but they don’t involve any shading or lighting–the computer calculates those based on the light sources and settings set up by the lighters (and shaders, but that part’s a little more complex and not necessarily relevant).

So if the art team wants to pull off the “black with blue shine” look on Marinette’s hair, how could they do it? They could try using blue lights, but to get a strong enough blue on her hair, well, it would make everything really blue, and that…wouldn’t look good. No, the simplest solution would be to make the diffuse color (plain base with no other settings) a dark shade of blue. That way, the shadows should be dark enough to read as black, but the light hitting it should create a lighter blue sheen.

This, of course, causes the entirety of her hair to appear blue with certain lighting, such as in the screencap above (you’ll notice that Adrien’s hair also looks lighter than usual in said screencap, more of a platinum than the usual gold-ish).

“So NattiKay, what you’re saying is that her hair really is blue after all??”

Well…yes and no. Behind the scenes, the diffuse texture on her hair probably is blue. However, this is not an indication of her official in-universe hair color so much as a method for getting a particular color style.

Because to the other characters, her hair it still considered black–even as Ladybug, whose “blue shine” is supposed to be stronger/more saturated than Marinette’s. We know this because we only have one place where her hair color is explicitly mentioned by another character, and it’s this:

Granted, I’m pretty sure the English dub phrases this as “dark as night”, which could still be a little ambiguous with the black-blue, but between this and Astruc’s tweet, I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that the other characters, at least, view Marinette’s hair as black.

tl;dr Marinette’s hair is canonically black. It does look blue in some shots because of the way 3D animation works, but in-universe/to the other characters, it still reads as black.

That is all, carry on.

ALL POSTS

(edited by Angellica159)

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