Series: How to Speak Hairstylist

Grey Blending on Light to Medium Brown Hair Edition

I love love love blended, dimensional color. It’s basically my whole brand. I might be shooting myself in the foot but I also really like creating colors with mindful placements that will grow out really nicely and not have a super harsh line of demarcation, or in other words that line where you can see down to the last minute when you got your hair done. My work looks beautiful for longer and my clients can get away with more time between appointments.

In the last 5 years I have seen more and more people transitioning to gray blending from full coverage. So instead of having ever single hair on your head covered in color we place highlight and/or lowlights strategically to blend them in and ideally work together as your hair grows. There is not a hard and fast formula for everyone so over the course of a few posts I’d like to show you some different options and shades for different natural colors and different percentages of gray.

This beautiful head of hair is naturally a medium brown with about 30-40% gray. In order to achieve this look we do a full highlight and lowlight. The highlights are pretty bright blonde which works well with the grays, the lowlight color is just about the same shade as her natural color, maybe one level darker to factor for fading. I also do the lowlights with a Demi-permanent color line rather than a permanent color. Again this helps the color to grow out more softly without that harsh line. Demi-permanent color wasn’t always capable of covering grays, but new and reformulated lines now do have the ability to either gray blend, or fully cover gray. Working in these highlights and lowlights together blends in the gray and just makes it appear a part of the dimension between her natural, the blonde highlights and the Demi-permanent lowlights. Is that blonde? Is it silver? Nobody has to know ;)

Because of this placement this client is able to get her hair done only about 3-4 times per year rather than every 6 weeks. If you do not want to see a single gray hair on your head after your hair is done this technique may not be for you, but if you’re stretching a either a time or monetary budget or like the idea of working with your gray rather than against it something like this could be a perfect fit for you. If you have naturally much darker hair this also may not be the best route, but I will present some other options for the brunette beauties soon!