Special Salon Hair Colouring Techniques

from bath and body

The techniques below can be beautiful or dramatic or both—as long as they're left to a professional. Even then, they take a talented hand and a skilled eye. At the very least, a colourist can see the back of your head, and you can't!

Highlighting and lowlighting. What was once called frosting is now called highlighting. Highlighting brightens the hair by adding light : to it. The colourist takes a lighter shade of your natural colour (or several shades lighter) and subtly lays it onto strands of the hair. It looks best when you use shades of gold, amber, and red. Even when the highlighting colour doesn't contrast sharply with the natural or base colour, it still lightens or brightens the overall effect. The process is subtle and time-consuming; it takes about an hour and a half.

Lowlighting is the same technique, with the introduction of darker tones instead of light, which add depth to the hair, especially if it's been lightened too much. Highlighting and lowlighting also help camouflage gray, and, because the colour is intentionally uneven, you won't need to be as fussy about regular touch-ups.

Some salons still use bleach to highlight, but I highly recommend that you look for a salon that uses tints instead. Not only is bleach harder on the hair and more limited in its applications, but it continues to lift colour until you stop the process. If your colourist happens to get distracted with another client while your hair is bleaching, your hair will go totally white. Then she'll have to add another step to the process and put colour back in again. Tints lift and deposit colour in one step, which means less potential damage to your hair, less risk of a colour disaster, and more control over the end result.

Some salons still use bleach to highlight, but I highly recommend that you look for a salon that uses tints instead. Not only is bleach harder on the hair and more limited in its applications, but it continues to lift colour until you stop the process. If your colourist happens to get distracted with another client while your hair is bleaching, your hair will go totally white. Then she'll have to add another step to the process and put colour back in again. Tints lift and deposit colour in one step, which means less potential damage to your hair, less risk of a colour disaster, and more control over the end result.

Bailiage. Colour is hand-painted onto random strands. It can be a great look for curly or wavy hair, and it's a great technique to cover a few random strands of gray.

Chunking (aka striping). This technique is generally credited to celebrity colourist Brad Johns, who first became famous for "chunking" Christy Turlington's hair in 1990. Chunking is similar to highlighting, but the look is much more obvious. The colourist grabs a few random hanks of hair and paints them in high contrast to the hair's natural colour. Sometimes both the base colour and the chunks are coloured. The effect is highly stylized, flagrantly fake, and, for some women, lots of fun.

Double processing. Invented in the 1930s, when everyone wanted to look like Jean Harlow, double processing is most often used to go blond. It involves two steps. First, the hair is stripped of its natural pigment with a combina¬tion of peroxide and ammonia. Then, a toner that deposits the desired colour onto the hair is applied. "The lighter, more ethereal shade of blond you go," says colourist Michael Brimhall, "the more you need heavy artillery." Double processing is hard on the hair, because when you go from dark to light you need more peroxide to "lift" or remove the colour; therefore you must leave it on longer than if you were darkening your hair. If you double-process your hair, make sure to condition and shampoo with special products for colour-treated hair.

Glazing or glossing. To add shine to the hair, a transparent gloss is layered on top of already coloured hair like a polish. Because most glosses are silicone-based, they add incredible shine to the surface of coloured or highlighted hair. They can be applied in between colour treatments or at the end of your colouring appointment. If your hair is dull, glazing or glossing is an inexpensive way to make it glisten.