I can't believe I missed that. It was just a matter of switching the type to texture on the mapping node.

Thank you so much! I got it to work, this workflow was a lot efficient than the hand tweaking was doing with the simple deform. Would you know a method on how to assign color to each of those strands? I tried looking if I could apply the mirror and assign the material to the vertices. That didn't work. I was thinking of UV mapping after applying the modifiers? Although, the mesh would be rather dense and hard to UV map... again, thank you for the help!