Your guide to Balayage hair
You may have seen the word Balayage banded about on social media in connection to hair, but not actually know what it is. It’s the popular hair colouring technique of the moment and I went to get it done at the Rainbow Room International salon on Glasgow’s George Square.
Balayage roughly means ‘to sweep’ in French and this hair technique involves your hair stylist randomly painting different colour tones directly onto your hair in order to achieve a more un-done, textured look. It basically mimics how your hair would be naturally lightened on holiday in the sun, so it has a much more natural effect than stark, linear foil highlights. You also don’t notice regrowth lines nearly as much with Balayage compared to foil highlights.
I started off with dark brown hair that was one solid block of colour, so first of all, my stylist Eilidh had to cover my roots again with dark brown, then bleach random sections of my hair with foils to lighten it. You need the heat from foils to get a really light shade when starting with dark hair, so that’s why my stylist had to start with this instead of going right into the Balayage technique. After the foils I now had a mixture of brown and blonde sections.
She then washed this out, applied a deep conditioning mask and then went off to mix up some bowls of hair dye in a few different tones of blonde and light brown. She then painted these onto different strands of my hair freehand (the Balayage step).
When my hair was blow dried and curled with tongs I had hair with so much depth and dimension to it. I couldn’t believe how natural and pretty it looked. I am now a Balyage devotee and I don’t think I’ll ever get anything else done to my hair again. I love having dark roots, but also being able to be partly blonde too. The whole process of doing my hair took around three hours, but it was definitely worth it, and maintaining it at future visits won’t take nearly as long.
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