Balayage Technique to get the Sun-Kissed Highlights

Balayage is a technique to colour hair by hand, painting the dye on your hair. The technique originated from France in the 1970s but is especially popular in Korean hair salons currently.

As you can see, this hair colour journey starts with the customer having dark, never-been-coloured hair. The customer has not done any chemical treatment to her hair, neither perm nor colour.

First, a hair treatment was applied which takes about 30 minutes to complete. Then comes the bleaching part. Bleach was hand painted on sections of the hair and wrapped in foil. The hair is then placed under a heater for 25 minutes.

As this is a first time bleaching, the technician was prudent to insist on only bleaching the hair once. But in order to get a lighter colour, bleaching 3 times is often required, before adding the dye to get the specific colouring.

When the foils are removed, the colour turned out better than the technician had originally hoped. The colour went straight to yellow as the customer has very intense yellow pigments. If a customer has very intense red, it may turn out a red hue, then further bleaching leading to an orange hue, then yellow after yet another bleach, then grey with further bleaching.

The choice of colours mainly depends on the customer, on the effect they want to achieve and on the pigments of the hair.

After the foils were removed, the hair undergoes a wash with purple shampoo to balance out the tones of the hair.

As the bleach is applied partially – from the mid-length down to the ends, in order to blend with the rest of the hair, a colour dye is first applied near the roots of the hair, then spread down to the ends. This evens out the tones and gives a gradual effect.