What is Balayage? Why Balayage Hair Is So Popular & Trendy?
Looking for some hair colour that has the power to stay in trend forever? Count on Balayage.
Balayage is an effortlessly cool hand-painted hair technique that you can pick up instantly and quite naturally. This technique gives your hair an obvious, natural and subtle look. And you know what? If you keep your Balayage hair maintained properly, you don’t need to book a colourist from time to time then.
Haven’t you heard about Balayage hair before? No worries. Here’s everything about Balayage that you need to know and how you can spot it differently from highlights and babylights.
So, let’s delve into it and see why Balayage is a popular trend.
What is Balayage? What does this term mean?
Meaning “to sweep”, this French word refers to how colour is applied to your hair without using any foil. Balayage is basically a technique, not a look, in which the colourist paints highlights with free-hands on the surface of your hair randomly. It gives him control to go for soft colouring or a bold one, whatever you want. As the colour sweeps onto your hair surface, its effect resulted in a naturally blended, sun-kissed glow that is not strictly patterned. You’ll feel like the light is naturally graduating towards where your hair ends, to give you a perfect summer-on-beach impression.
While talking about this hair technique, Celebs colourist George Papanikolas said, “What I like most about Balayage is it can be gentle and subtle or bold and vibrant, with the same universally pleasing impact.”
You need not worry about how Balayage will blend with your base. You can apply this highlighting technique to any hair colour, not just blondes, just for adding a new dimension. Its shade is slightly lighter than your actual base colour, which helps seamlessly lock some natural-looking highlight depth into your hair colour. It means you’ll get pops of colour contrast and brightness throughout your hair with some gorgeous dimensions, giving a vibe of a God-gifted look.
Moreover, do not get confused between partial balayage vs full balayage. You can go for full Balayage hair, which will give you an overall lighter look without any need to maintain the root grow-out. And you can also give a try to partial Balayage at the first attempt, either just on the upper hair area or hair around the face, to see if it’s worth trying or not.
What Makes Balayage So Popular And Trendy?
The reason why colorists love Balayage is that they can easily hand-select the hair strands. Then, as required, they can opt for different Balayage colors, textures, lengths, placement, and graduation to highlight or soften the client’s vibe. They need to consider the client’s skin tone and hair base to identify the perfect Balayage tone. This natural-looking customized Balayage placement makes it popular in the fashion industry.
On the other hand, people and celebrities both prefer Balayage because it appears more natural and requires far less care and maintenance than traditional highlights. It gives you a natural grown-out roots look, and it saves your time and money a lot by making itself more tailored to you.
If you’re a Balayage client, you can easily stretch your regrowth touch-up period to 12 weeks or even longer, thus doing less damage to your hair. That’s why celebrities like the Kardashians and Chrissy Teigen spotted having this color trend. So it’s no surprise that it’s catching on with the general public.
Felt into it? We all are.
How Is Balayage Done?
You should have an end look in your mind that you’re craving for. It will help your colorist know what exactly you’re looking for. The things you will tell him should include how casually you style your hair and what hair part you like the least and most. Your colorist will contour and highlight your hair according to your features and lifestyle.
After that, your stylist will use bleach to paint portions of your hair. To simulate the way hair naturally lightens in the sun, the strokes should be light toward the root and more saturated toward the ends of the hair.
It’s all about placing and blending when it comes to Balayage. The contrast between light and dark tones is what gives room to a more realistic, lived-in feel by mixing colors smoothly.
What makes Balayage different from Highlights and Babylights?
Wanna know about Babylights vs Balayage or Balayage vs Highlights? Read on.
Whether it’s the term Balayage, Babylights, or Highlights, they all are different techniques to lighten your hair. You can go for all to style a combined look or just give a go to any of them, and it’s all up to you.
But all these hairdo techniques have got a subtle distinction that sets them apart from each other. So let’s find out the differences between Balayage, Highlights, ad Babylights to see which one’s the best fit for you.
What are Highlights?
- Highlights are a traditional method to lighten your hair and add depth to it using aluminium foils. These foils are sectioned placed, covering strands from root to tip, near your scalp to give more bright color lines throughout for an intense effect. And the result is a structured and tonal hairdo.
- Wrapping hair strands in foils has one advantage: it saves your time by quickly developing a color (also known as lightening more quickly) than hand-painting.
Consider it just a myth that highlights are just for blondes. Not at all. They can also be used to lighten any hair color or shade strands.
So if you want to style a more pronounced contrast between your darkened base color and lightened strands, then try Highlights. But remember, you need to touch up your highlights more often to deal with inevitable grown-out roots as compared to Balayage. Besides, it also needs proper care to maintain the contrast and avoid root color showing up.
What are Babylights?
- As suggested by the name, Babylights is the highlighting technique that is done on a thin and small hair section. It mimics a child’s naturally-highlighted hair look to give you the best grown-out results by breaking up the root color.
- When you frame these babylights around your face, it adds a soft glow to your facial features. They’re also an excellent method to incorporate color if you’re looking for a change but don’t want to go too far.
So the conclusion is if you want to carry more subtle, super sun-kissed, and low-maintenance highlights, go for Babylights.
Balayage Hair
As discussed earlier, Balayage is a free-hand highlighting technique used to create a soft, blended appearance but without using the foils.
This hairdo technique focuses on mid-shafts and ends of hair strands rather than the roots. And the effect? Seamlessly blended sun-kissed glow with the lightest hair tips.
You’ll find no harsh or demarcation lines as the new Balayage color is just a few shades lighter than your natural one. This seamless transition lasts longer and allows you to go for months without touching it up.
How To Keep Your Balayage Maintained?
As Balayage allows you to go for months (nearly a year) without touching your hairdo, it doesn’t mean that you’re completely off the hook when maintenance is concerned.
To keep your new-do Balayage hair shade fresh for long, use a hydrating hair mask for a shimmery look and a toning shampoo to balance out cropping-up brassy tones.
You can also go for a glossing refresher at your stylist to get the tonality to add back in. It is also a less inexpensive way to enjoy some gorgeous results rather than damaging your hair in a full-color session.
Is It Possible To Do Balayage At Home?
Well, doing hair color at home should be fun, right? So, if you want to try Balayage at home, always start with 4-5 (less noticeable) strands until you get more confidence. But, yeah, going for more is undoubtedly my thing.
But if you don’t find it as effortless as it probably seems, I recommend you leave it to professionals. Don’t try to play around with the most dramatic accessory you got- hair.
Balayage techniques are very precise for enjoying a natural look and need more practice. As Balayage is not a foiling technique, I’m confident that you can’t deal with it if your one strand color bleeds onto another non-colored strand, particularly when you intend to do Rainbow Balayage.
Some Awe-Inspiring Balayage ideas for all hair colors
Even if your hair is extremely black or kinky-curly, you can still experiment with these natural-looking highlights. Don’t worry about what hair color or type is worth trying Balayage on. Balayage can be done on any texture and hair color.
Let’s look at some of the best Balayage hair ideas to see how differently you can try this technique.
1. Balayage On Brown Hair
Try cool brown Balayage highlights if you want to add some newness to your brunette with a minor change. Ask your stylist to maintain your hair base dark and add some soft Balayage brown highlights with gloss in it.
2. Root Blur Balayage
To achieve the Root Blur Balayage, request your colorist for a shadow root and have it fade down into your hair. It will give you a more blended grow-out with a fresh feel.
3. Golden Balayage
You can’t go wrong with golden-tone if you’re a woman of color. It will look great on your natural hair color, just like it does on Nicollette, a famous vlogger.
4. Two-toned Balayage
Two-toned Balayage looks perfect as now as it was when Lucy Hale was spotted wearing this blond Balayage technique.
5. Red Balayage Hair
Balayage red hair is a bold style that uses a sweeping technique to create a subtle color transition throughout your locks for adding dimension.
You can still experiment with color if you have a naturally striking hair color like red.
6. Grey Balayage
Do you enjoy incorporating romance novel drama into your daily routine? Then try this Grey Balayage with rosy roots. It’s a bit filmy but stunning.
7. Subtle Black Balayage
Balayage on dark hair colors like Black is such a stylish inspiration. It’s a technique that skilled stylists employ to transform a flat, dark-based mane into one that’s richly textured and full-bodied.
Conclusion
So, what is balayage? Balayage is a hair coloring technique that results in natural-looking highlights. It’s perfect for giving your hair some depth and dimension, and it looks especially good on darker hair colors. If you’re thinking of trying out this trendy new color technique, we recommend heading to a salon that specializes in balayage. With the help of a professional, you can achieve beautiful, sun-kissed highlights that will make your locks look totally amazing. Have you tried balayage before? Let us know how it went in the comments below!
