Taking control of your hair color is nothing for a magical girl to get embarrassed about, after all.

The newest addition to Japan’s pantheon of magical girl anime characters recently made her debut. While to her friends she’s just another ordinary second-year junior high school student, Liese Prettia secretly defends her town from the forces of darkness by transforming into her heroic alter ego and doing battle with the terrible Baron Devil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdF2hY0cFio

Like any proper magical girl, Liese is assisted by a cute mentor/familiar. But unlike Sailor Moon’s feline friend Luna or Cardcaptor Sakura’s stuffed animal impostor Kero-chan, Liese gets help from a mass of sentient bubbles that hangs out in her hair.

In order to keep her secret, Liese’s appearance has to change when it’s time for her to spring into action, so of course she has a transformation sequence.

Not only does she get a costume formed from magical bubbles, her hair color changes as well. That’s a pretty big step as far as obscuring her identity goes (neither Sailor Moon nor Sakura keep their natural hair colors post-transformation), but one that’s entirely to be expected from Liese Prettia, since she shares her name with a line of hair dyes, and no, it’s not a coincidence.

Magical girl Liese is actually a 2D pseudo-spokesmodel for Japanese company Kao’s Liese Prettia line of hair coloring products, and at the very end of the video we see a woman sitting on her couch watching the anime and saying “I used to think I could transform myself like a magical girl,” with the implied message that with Kao’s hair dyes, you can.

Oddly enough, the Liese Prettia hair dye lineup is composed of natural-looking brown and blond shades, so it can’t actually help you achieve the look of magical girl Liese or the countless wildly colorfully tressed anime heroines that inspired her design. Still, there’s something to be said for the way the video seems to be saying “If you want to change your hair color, don’t feel bad about it,” helping to lessen the potential embarrassment customers might feel over dying their hair in response to natural graying as they move into an age bracket far beyond the adolescence of anime characters.

Source: YouTube/KaoJapan via Nijimen
Top image: YouTube/Kao Japan