 Hi, beautiful. So, have you ever been to a salon, sat down to get your hair done by the stylist? They're like, what do you wanna do with your hair today? And then you look at them and they look at you and you look back. And then you're sitting there saying things like, I want bright highlights starting at my eye, going down and getting lighter at the bottom and like a little bit of darkness over here and over here. And your stylist is just like, what? What are you talking about? And then the stylist proceeds to use big words like baby lights, balayage, hair painting, root shadows, root smudges. And you're like, who is that? I don't know anybody named Root Smudge. Well, today I'm here to help mend hairstylists and clients and bring peace to the world. Maybe not a lot, but like just a little bit. So, we're gonna go over all the tricky words and phrases. So, by the end of today's video, you'll have a much better understanding of highlights, how they work, how they're done, and how to ask for the kinds of highlights you're looking for that way you and your colorists can be on the same exact page and you will get the hair of your dreams. So, let's do it. Woo! So, what are highlights, Brad? Let's start with the absolute most basic of basic, just making both get a clear understanding of what we're talking about today. The word highlights really just describes the lighter pieces put into the hair to add dimension to the color. Highlights are a great way to make your hair look more vibrant, more healthy, attract more light to your hair, that way it bounces off and gives you amazing gloss to your hair. Everybody could use highlights in some which way. Hair color just looks better, more natural, and more professionally done when there is a highlight involved in the color process. Now that we know the absolute basics of what a highlight is, let's move on to some examples of different kinds of highlights and I have quite a few for ya. So, get your notepad out, start taking notes. We're gonna go over a lot of things today and hopefully it'll help you. So, let's talk about full saturation hair painting or balayage. Balayage, I don't know where exactly that word came from, but it's a interesting word that a lot of people can't pronounce. They say bulayage, they say balaj, they say belayage, like I've heard everything, everything, and I laugh every time. So, I like to refer to balayage as hair painting, it's just easier, it makes more sense in people's heads. Just go with that, hair painting, people will know what that is. So, here's an example of full saturation hair painting. Now, which full saturation hair painting is when you take both sides of the hair and you fully saturate it. So, you're not only painting the surface, you're painting the underneath of that surface and making sure all of the lightener is fully saturated on the hair strand to make it super thick and creamy and have a lot of lightener on each strand of the hair. This will give you a super dimensional, chunky, beautiful highlight. And don't let the word chunky scare you. I try not to use that with clients because the word chunky just brings people back to like the 90s when we were doing like awful chunky highlights. I mean, it was cool back then. Don't get me wrong. But a lot of the time we start off with chunkier highlights and then we do something called a root shadow which we'll get to later. But full saturation painting is something that I do on most clients just because it is the most bang for your buck and you can get a lot of surface area covered in a short amount of time and it creates a beautiful result as seen in these photos. And that's full saturation hair painting or balayage is when you paint both sides of the hair and make a beautiful highlighted strand with your lightener. Okay, next let's move on to partial saturation hair painting. Now this is hard to decipher between full saturation hair painting and partial. They can pretty much be intermixed as much as you want. I am a full saturation kind of girl because I like to, you know, get it done fast and I like to get it a heavy highlight in there. However, there are clients say they have dark hair and they're looking for a tiny bit of lightness going through and they want it to look natural. You might just take the surface of the hair and paint the top of it instead of painting both the underneath and the top and fully bringing all that lightener through the hair strands. That way when their hair is blow dried and done it is a very subtle highlight effect that kind of just has a sprinkle of lightness going through the head and it doesn't look totally highlighted and fully saturated. However, you can also make a super dimensional blonde if you are only painting the surface because say when you lift your hair up or you flip your head over you're gonna see a lot of darkness underneath those highlights if you only do partial saturation you're gonna have all of that darkness staying on the bottom of the hair and then it's gonna give you beautiful dimension as seen in this picture which is also a beautiful look. Usually I'm using partial saturation hair painting when I'm doing darker hair when I don't wanna crazy HD bright highlight on the head or I'm transitioning somebody out of just a regular single process, full one color hair moment and they kinda wanna test out the waters of highlighting and I kinda just sweep some highlights on the top of their hair that way they get just a little bit more dimension but it's not a totally crazy difference for them. And then next time maybe we'll move on to full saturation and we'll add more and more highlights each time. That is partial saturation, hair painting or balayage and let's move on to the next thing. Let's talk about baby lights or a fine weave highlight. So typically these are done in foils because they use the extreme amount of heat to incubate them and make them super bright. Also foils are just a great way to organize your sections and keep everything neat and clean and tidy and beautiful and the hardness of the foil is just really easy to maneuver and to fold and to keep in place so foils are just a great option when your hairstyle is. So baby lights. This is a new term that people like to use when saying their weaves are super, super duper fine that you can hardly even see them and that's basically what baby lights are. So people usually use a tail comb, they slice a section out and they do a super fine weave of the hair and then the late on the foil, paint it with lightener and you can do just a few of these to make a very low impact result but a beautiful little sparkle in the hair or you can do a ton of them and have a really high impact blonde result. This will give you hardly any line of demarcation where you highlighted the hair. So the finer the weave, usually the less visible to the eye of where you actually got highlights done. So people like to do this to make a super blended look most of the time and it's a beautiful result if you have the patience for it, you can also combine baby lights on the top of the hair with full saturation balayage like we talked about before and it'll give you this kind of beautiful sparkly glow at the top with a really high impact full saturation highlighted at the bottom and that is something that I like to do a lot is combine both of those techniques and by the way, you guys we're going through all these techniques right now but most of these things you combine one, two, three different techniques on one head in order to make a creative masterpiece of hair. So baby lights will give you that very soft dimensional little sprinkle of highlights. Okay, next let's talk about sliced highlights. So instead of doing the weave like we talked about last time we can also do something called a slice which is my favorite. Listen, full saturation and slicing. Yes, give it to me right now. So a slice is literally just a slice. This is what it looks like. You just put the comb through, take that section and you put the foil on and you paint it with lightener. Slicing is a great way to get a lot of highlights done in a little amount of time. It is a great way to get high impact, high volume of highlights and do it very fast because you don't have to take that time to actually weave the highlight. You can just slice it and then you put on the foil and you're done and you move on and you move on and you move on and you can actually make these slices quite thick if you'd like to. And then you can follow up with a root smudge or root shadow at the end in order to blend all of the seams. But it's a much faster, much easier approach to highlighting in my opinion. And also you can get a low impact result if you're taking very thin slices instead of thick ones. It'll give you a very soft dimensional look and if you skip more hair in between the highlights or less hair, it'll give you a different look there. But that is what slice highlights are. Okay, now let's go over what a toner or gloss is. Toner and gloss are lifesavers. I mean, they're pretty much the same thing. They can be changed out whenever you want to. I think gloss just sounds better. Toner is kind of like old school. But what people don't understand, I don't think is what really is a toner or gloss. Now toner and gloss can be used for so many different purposes. So it's pretty hard to describe it all. So I'm gonna do my best. As you can see in the pictures here, this girl starts off as a kind of yellowish-bronzy blonde. And then after she has more of a copper-brown highlight going on, so what they did to get to that end result is add more copper tones with a toner. And toner is a deposit-only color. It is demi-permanent. And the difference between permanent colors and demi-permanent colors is that there's no lifting that's going on to the hair. It is only depositing tone. So you can make the hair any kind of color you want with a toner. Now, typically when you're highlighting, toners are used most often to make the hair appear more ash-toned, get it more white, get it more vibrant. And so I find that a lot of clients will freak out about their hair when they see a little bit of their hair rinsed out. They'll look in their phone camera and they'll be like, oh my God, like why is my hair so yellow? Why does it look like this? Why is it so bright at the root? And you're like, we haven't added the toner yet. The toner will literally completely change your look in a matter of five, 10 minutes. So do me a favor or do yourselves a favor and do not come and complain to us about your hair until it is all finished and we start blow-drying it because a lot of the times the most magic happens right at that last 10 minutes of your color session. And the toner and the gloss can really change up the whole vibe of what we've been doing the entire day. So just chill until the toner is done and then you can complain or be happy, whatever happens, I don't know. Now that brings me on to our next technique which is a root smudge or a root shadow, as I like to call it. They're both interchangeable, they're both the same thing. Sort of, I mean, some people say that root smudges like go down farther on the head and root shadows are just kind of other roots. So I guess you could probably, I don't know, that just seems complicated to me. I like to just intermix them. People don't really know what you're talking about anyways so you kind of can just put that out there and say like, I'm gonna do a root smudge and they're like, okay, yeah, I do it. But let's just say root shadow today gives you that sort of bohemian grown out, lived in hair vibe that is quite current and is what most clients are looking for now. Nobody really wants that super bright, bright, stripy highlight right at the top of their roots. What I have right now is a root smudge. You see how it's pretty light at the ends but at the root, it looks like it's kind of growing out of my scalp? That's what's going on now. And also, hi new hair, how you doing? Oh my God. In a minute since I have not been platinum blonde, it's been like four years or something like that. I don't know, it's been a long time but I'm actually living for this. Let me know what you guys think about it. But root shadows are such an amazing lifesaver. You can really cover up any mistakes that you make with a root shadow. You can blur the lines between their natural hair color and the highlights you just put in their hair. So you can do super chunky highlights to start and then you can bring that highlight way back down to nearly their natural color with a root smudge or root shadow. And you'll give a super nice, chunky highlight at the bottom with a grown out, cool vibe at the top. And it's just an easy way to make the hair look more lived in and more natural and not like you just stepped out of the salon. We could go into a lot more technical detail today but I'm not going to because I'll be here forever explaining root shadows and how I like to do them. Okay, next let's go over the money piece or a face framing highlight, whichever one you want to call it. Money piece just sounds like more fun to me but whatever you want to do. So we've gotten kind of crazy with money pieces lately. I'm not too much of a fan of the crazy bright money pieces in the front of the hair. I just think it looks kind of wacky and kind of like, wow, yeah. You definitely have some highlights going on there. It's a lot, it's a lot for me but that's what your thing is and do it. This is what a money piece looks like. It is that really bright highlight that goes like whoop or like whoop like all around the face. It's used to really draw attention to the face and literally put a frame around it. I think face framing highlights are great when they're done minimally. I just don't always love these super chunky front pieces. It's not my style and a lot of people love it and that's totally cool. But this face framing highlight can be done with all the different styles we just talked about say with foils, you can do it. You can do it with full saturation hair painting. You can do a partial saturation hair painting. You can then do a root shadow on it or a root smudge and you can do all sorts of things with it but that is what a money piece or face framing highlight is and that's that, that one's easy. Woo, those are all of the different kinds of highlights you can get. Now, I'm sure you can add a million different techniques onto that list but those are the super basics and basically all of the new highlight techniques are based off of those techniques. So if you know the basics, go from there. I hope after watching today's video you can better communicate with your hairstylist what kind of highlights you're looking to get from them because the better you explain what you're looking for the better we can give you that end result. Now, I recommend always coming in to the salon with photos and try to explain in as much detail as possible what you're looking for. That way, both of us can be on the same exact track and we can get you that perfect outcome because what happens sometimes is when a hairstylist is not that experienced is they may not know how to have a proper consultation and sometimes the consultation will end short and sometimes these stylists will still be confused but they won't tell you and that is when you end up with something that you weren't looking for. So making sure that you know what you're looking for and you describe it well will always be a much more foolproof plan of action on how you can get that perfect desired result. So that's all from me on the highlights today. I hope you guys learned a lot. I had fun teaching you and don't forget to follow me on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok, at BramondoNYC. Check out my haircare line, X-Mondo Hair. It is linked below and also on Instagram at X-MondoHair and that is all for today. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to live your extra life. See you next time. Bye.