Last week, Carlos Alcaraz celebrated his Grand Slam win by bleaching his buzz cut.

Tuesday afternoon, forty-something hours after showing up to the U.S. Open freshly shorn (he said his brother “misunderstood with the machine”), Alcaraz appeared on Instagram in a makeshift aluminum beanie with white cream poking out around his temple.

His pivot to peroxide came at the end of an eighteen-slide carousel captioned, “Blessed hands,” with a couplet of emojis distilling the key takeaway: “🏆💈.” After recapping off-court moments like eating ramen and clubbing with Adrien Brody, the photo dump ended with his trophy poised on the edge of a roof, and then some foreshadowing: a shirtless selfie of Alcaraz on a sunny balcony with foil presciently clutching his scalp.

Seventeen hours later, he added to his Story: “✌️ ⚪” over a shot of his hair bleached beyond blond.

What do we call this spectral shade? Colorists use the term “level ten,” the point where pigment is fully stripped. It’s somewhere between gray, violet, and invisible. Imagine a Scandi-blond standing under the surgical cast of a Greyhound bus stop bathroom light, say. It’s cool and clinical but also campy and space-age in a retro-futurist Jetsons silver kind of way but with a bit of a powdery Versailles vibe. Think: the synthetic glare of a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser but with a celestial edge.

Online, people compared it to a snow cone and mold spore (I think they mean the hyphal growth around sporangium). Others invoked Eminem, tennis ball fuzz, Draco Malfoy, and other pure-blood wizards. An X user mentioned “big anime villain energy.” In a thread titled, “Alcaraz’s new haircut. No, it’s not AI,” someone said it was proof that Alcaraz is lab-grown, “I see no other explanation.”

Alcaraz’s barber might have one. Victor Martinez (@victorbarbers5) shared the bleach job on TikTok with the message: Nos volvimos locos pero tenemos palabra (roughly translated to “we went crazy but we keep our word”), suggesting, perhaps, some kind of pre-game platinum promise.