"I'd like to add some life to this hair," Julie told Lewis as she sat in his chair for a color consult, "to maybe try and bring the 'sun into it' if that's possible, to sort of keep summer with me all year long," she said, adding one proviso, "just no copper -- red and I don't get along. I look like a Cabbage Patch Kid."
Lewis agreed that Julie's hair color was too dark and did nothing to showcase her natural beauty and sparkly sense of humor. "I'm going to bump up your base a half-shade to a shade lighter � [and ] I want to do sun-kissed natural highlights on half of your head, lighter on the top with caramel highlights."
If you have dark strands like Julie, adding face-framing, carmel-colored highlights is a great (and low maintenance way) to brighten or warm up your shade.
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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.
Most women have the prerogative of being able to change their hairstyles and hair color whenever they feel like it. For actresses (especially ones that are newer to the game), however, it's not that easy. Not only do they have agents (who signed them looking a certain way) to answer to, but there's also the matter of those costly headshots to consider, not to mention that it could be very risky to gamble it all away on a whim.
That was TotalBeauty.com reader Julie's problem. She's a 27-year-old actress and is beginning to get a foothold in the business but wanted to do something to put some oomph into her long, dark hairstyle -- without making too drastic of a change. Was it possible?
"My biggest hair bummer is the weight of this mop," she said on a recent Saturday morning at the Argyle Salon & Spa in West Hollywood, Calif. "Having so much of it just looks soooo drab."
Not for long. Julie was about to meet hair colorist extraordinaire, Alfredo Lewis. He's worked wonders on celebrities like Sandra Bullock and Holly Hunter. And on this day, a series of transformations for his newest client would soon be underway. See what Lewis and the rest of the Total Beauty makeover squad did to revamp Julie's hairstyle and makeup look (because no makeover is complete with out new makeup) without making her unrecognizable. You might just be able to steal her transformation secrets and make them your own.
