What is Balayage, anyway?
Above is an image of some beautiful cool tones painted into my client’s hair for spring/summer 2015. She wanted to be grey, but has a conservative career that she is pursuing. We chose a color with strong hints of cool silvery brown and blonde.
Balayage is a french color technique that comes out of the 70’s. Balayage means to sweep or to paint. The technique is created by hand painting decolorizer or color into the hair. This can be done on all lengths of hair, but it looks best on styles that fall below the shoulders. This technique can look soft and natural. The draw to this color is that it is low maintenance. In this current day and time women are busy and want gorgeous hair that still looks good when they return to the salon. The goal is to keep the root/base deep and rich with color or come close to the natural color. The highlights should be randomly places into the color design so the grow out is subtle.
Below is a gallery of images from Tasha Torres, a stylist at Salon Envy, the salon where I work. She does a ton of this kind of work. She is well known for her skill in this style of coloring so I collected some images for you to see.
I use TIGI Color Meches so I can paint the color where I want it in the packet. In the application I used decolorizer and color in the same packet of highlights to create a very random and soft effect. There was very little done to the hair but it created a high impact.