Hair Care

Dramatic (But Wearable) Hairstyle Transformation

Hang on to summer with a few well-placed highlights the way TotalBeauty.com reader Julie did -- it took her hairstyle from serious to sexy

by Audrey Fine

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The color With the plan of action set in place, Lewis began the process of lightening Julie's dark hair and applying the highlights.

"First we're doing a 'smudge,'" he explained, "it's a process where the bleach is put on for 10 minutes, lifted, and removed and the color is smudged into place."

Following the first process, Lewis realized that he wanted to do more -- to give her base color more of a lift.

"They did do two treatments on my hair because it was so dark and had some old color on it to begin with," recalls Julie. "Also, I pull reds really easily so Alfredo did a color wash with some green in it to even out my base color to an all-over lighter tone without it turning copper." Note: If you can avoid doing an allover color and get away with just adding a few key highlights, your growth will be less obvious. In Julie's case though, that wasn't an option.

Next step? The highlights.

Once he was content with Julie's new base color, Lewis explained that he was going to do a balayage highlighting process (a French coloring technique that means "sweeping" -- as in sweeping the product onto the hair, sans foils).

To capture the "sun" as she'd wanted him to, Lewis planned to place natural light-looking highlights on the top half of her head with lighter caramel highlights framing her face.

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