Aquarelle: Balayage or Ombré Highlights

Dec 15, 2010

Balayage or Ombré Highlights

As I had mentioned some days ago, I had my hair dyed from light brown with golden blonde highlights to a red auburn shade. All of it. Over the weekend I realized I look better with highlights yet, one of the main reasons to dyeing it all darker, is because I don't always have the time nor the cash to do a whole set of highlights every 4-5 weeks.
Well that is about to change. Again, over the weekend I decided to waste my time looking up all kinds of highlights when I came across Alexa Chung and her grown out highlights. That is exactly the effect I want! beachy, sunkissed hair that looks good and very natural; on top of that since the look is strategically "grown out" I wouldn't have to visit the salon every other paycheck. I can pull this off, I said, so I was on a quest to look up the process and where to get it done.

Alexa Chung

Turns out this technique of middle-range highlights are called balayage highlights, or free-hand, which means these are done by hand and without aluminum foils. Basically they saturate the very tips more than the middle of the strand, and they have to do so carefully so it mimics the beachy highlights we are trying to achieve. This way the hair gets a "I just spent the summer at the beach" look and ends up looking amazing.

Jessica Biel

Rachel Bilson

Lily Aldridge

Leighton Meester

While doing a bit more of research I found out about ombré highlights, which are a similar effect though on a lot of websites it is used as a synonym for balayage highlights. One of the salons I called actually made it out to be two different kinds of highlighting techniques, though I didn't quite understand her explanation as to how they are different. In any case, I love it, and I believe I'm going to try these as soon as I am able to find a certified hair salon that is available, like, this week, not a month from now.

While you can definitely go for this cute bohemian, very laissez-faire kind of look, you could also take it the opposite direction, with a more punk-ish and colorful turn, like Hipster poster girl Drew Barrymore, Lady Gaga, and Katie Shillingford, among others.

Drew Barrymore

Now even though the previous two are a bit out there, they're nothing like Katie Shillingford's do, which starts white then blue and slowly fades to black. Think what you may, I think this looks badass.