What Is Balayage?: Understanding Your Balayage Hair & Application Techniques

To get the best results for your balayage hairstyle, you should understand what to expect from the balayage hair ideas proposed to you. The tools, hair products, painting, and styling techniques contribute to the outcome of the balayage hair color. Here’s a complete guide to help you understand your balayage hair and also explore the most effective application techniques.

What Is Balayage?

Balayage; this French word means “sweeping.” Relating that to hair terminology and beauty, balayage simply means to glide through a hair lightener while creating multiple highlights in the process. The popular balayage hair blonde technique simply involves free-hand painting of highlights on the natural hair or hair extensions. The creative painting often helps to create a natural-like and soft gradation of lightness on the edges.

The outcome of a typical balayage look could be compared to a timeout at the beach and the almost perfect highlights on a child’s hair. Many often subject the natural-looking highlights to recreating the balayage hair blonde look alone. However, the results look gorgeous on burette balayage, brown balayage, dark balayage, as well as ash balayage. Whichever balayage hair color you long for, you’d get the sun-kissed dimensions.

We have varying application preferences for getting the balayage hair straight look. Some colorists approach coloring by separating with cotton pieces, many would rather not, while others use foils for easy division. The results you desire may sometimes be dependent on the coloring approach of achieving the balayage hairstyle.  Regardless, the free-hand painting, customized, and natural-looking coloration make balayage so popular.

Differences Between Highlights & Balayage

As we just answered your what is a balayage hair color question, many often love to know the differences between highlights and balayage. So let’s get to it!

Highlights in hair design generally refer to a section or few sections of the hair usually lighter than the base color. Contrary to what many argue about, highlights aren't stereotypical to blondes alone but generally mean lightening a few sections or strands of the hair - which often makes it different from other parts.

When applying highlights, colorists use the foiling method to achieve the level of coloration needed. The sheets of foil help highlighting the desired areas easily, prevent the lightening product from extending to other parts, as well as trap heat for effective lightening. Foil highlights are arranged on the scalp to help to lighten the hair from the base.

Balayage on the other hand involves the free-hand application of highlights without using sheets of foils (foiling technique). With balayage hair coloration, you'd get an even, precise, and a natural gradation of lightness on each strand of hair. Since it's free-hand coloring, balayage makes it easy to achieve the fading effect common to all blonde hair types.

The highlighter application goes deeper into the scalp while causing a fading transition towards the ends. Ideally, all balayage hair ideas follow a trend of starting away from the roots, to the middle area, and down to the ends of the hair. From afar, both highlights and balayage look similar but the difference begins to unravel as you move closer.

For all things pretty and most gorgeous balayages and highlights come visit us at Define Hair Studio!" (Put a link on Define Hair Studio to our website)