 Hey guys. My name is Brian here with freesaloneducation.com and I'm here with the very first of our 14 tips to becoming a better hair colorist. The point of all these tips is really just to help give maybe a little reminder of some of the stuff that you already know or maybe it'll be some tips that are new to you. The point of these is just really to kind of help you out and maybe get you a little bit more efficient as a colorist or get you thinking in new ways or trying new stuff. So I figured for our first tip a great way to start off was going to be starting with how every color service should start and that's going to be identifying natural level. It seems kind of silly to think about like oh well why would you have to do a tip on that but maybe it's not super simple for everybody so hopefully here's a little something just to help you figure this out so that you're set up for success a little bit better. When it comes to identifying natural level you're certainly going to want to find a spot on their head that is going to tell you best where what their actual natural hair color really is so the best bet for that the best spot for that is going to be generally around the backside of the head below the hair that is going to lay on top so generally around the area of the parietal ridge in the back of the head. The reason for that is all of this hair on top naturally is going to get sun lightened or is going to see just a little bit more wear and tear from styling which is going to make hair color fade a little bit whether it's artificial or natural hair color. So coming under here generally you're going to see your truest form of what their hair actually is. It also tends to be one of the spots where it's the darkest which is good because when you formulate knowing that is going to give you it's going to tell you what you need to use to get where you want to go. So now that you've determined where to go on the head the next step is going to be to use a natural level finder. Most color lines that I have worked with all have one of these generally it's in the the color swatch book they don't have one that specifically for that then you're just going to go to the the most natural neutral whatever that baseline is for them because it tends to be pretty middle of the road so you're going to take your natural level finder and you're going to come back to that area that we talked about right in the back of the head and you're just going to determine where in your color world this person's natural is. This one looks like she's generally about a level six. Obviously she's a little warmer than the swatch but as far as her natural level. Thank you guys. Hope that helped out a little bit. Check us out at freesaloneducation.com. Thanks. Bye.