Blondes don’t necessarily have more fun, they just have more blonde! If you’re a brunette yearning for a change and only highlights can give you that satisfaction, do something different and opt for blonde. Getting hair highlights is an easy and fabulous way to rejuvenate your looks. It can make you look younger, more alive and offer more color to your skin. Are you sold yet?
There are essentially 4 kinds of highlights: basic foil highlights, "hair painting," also known as baliage, chunking or "piecing" and lowlighting. The traditional foil methods for highlighting have stayed around for the simple reason that they deliver fantastic results but they are also much harder to care for once the roots grow out. They do however, add strands of color to hair and can lend up to 5 different shades to make it look more natural.
Widely spaced more chunky and less structured pieces of color also referred to as ‘hair painting’ or baliage, will be much easier to deal with and won’t look like you need a touch up job so quickly. "Hair painting" allows the stylist to add natural stripes of color to hair in large or smaller swaths. This is ideal for women with a really good base color that want to go just a couple of shades lighter. Chunking and piecing can create a trendy and customized look with thicker strands of color put in and lowlighting allows you to add darker shades to hair lending even more contrast than your natural color. Whether getting it done professionally or on your own at home, be sure you know which color blonde you want to try before you can’t reverse the results.
If you’re already a blonde and want to go lighter, forget platinum on your whole head and go for highlights a shade or two lighter than your hair already has. Highlights around the face will help brighten your complexion. Because of this, it will also give a youth-ifying look and who could say that’s a bad thing? When choosing your shade, go for blondes that warm the skin and enhance your natural hair color. Blonde highlights do wonders on fine hair as any sort of color adding will cause hair shafts to swell but in addition to that, if you’re a brunette, the lighter hair mixed with the dark will add dimension and create the illusion of depth and drama.
If your hair is ultra thick and you’re having qualms about highlighting it completely, ask the hairstylist to color the hair that shows when your tresses are up in a ponytail. Not only will this process be much less time consuming but it will also look more natural as if you’ve been sitting a few days on the beach and caught the sun on the parts it hits the hardest, the top. This is called partial highlights and gives a more summery beach feel to your hairstyle. Whatever you opt for, spring is here and summer right around the corner. Going a little lighter is a terrific way to enter the season and leave the cold dark winter behind for a few more months.
