Balayage. I first heard the term nine or ten years ago. Back then I was strictly a beauty editor, and it was described to me as a revolutionary hair coloring technique that had far more natural-looking results than the usual foil-centric methods. So I went and gave it a whirl. And wound up looking like a candy cane.
The dark blonde sections were far too reddish; the light blondes far too light, and the contrast was so stark, you could almost count the stripes from a full city block away.
Needless to say, I ran straight back to traditional foils from then on…. Until this past summer, that is, when I finally had had enough of the sun repeatedly turning my entire head a vomit-inspiring, sunflower yellow-meets-an-actual-orange (as opposed to the beachy beige highlights I crave) in under a month after just getting it colored. That also then came with the added bonus of that hideous line of root regrowth–also in under a month.
“So, who does your hair?” I asked a dear friend, who always sports bright, buttery locks in disparate shades that look like they came straight from days spent at picnics and on yachts. “Jenna Shilalis at Gretta Cole,” she answered. “She’s amazing and can do any kind of color, but her balayage is in a whole different stratosphere.”
So back to balayage it was–hesitantly, of course, given my previous run-in with it.
But once I was in Shilalis’s chair, it was, indeed, a whole new stratosphere. “It’s changed a lot since it first came along,” she tells me as she uses a flat paddle to meticulously apply color to my strands, freeform. “Done by the wrong person, it can definitely can look like a stripey skunk,” she laughs, after I’ve told her the tale of my first disaster. “But if you know where and how to paint it–and how much–it looks leaps and bounds more natural.”
She’s not kidding when she uses the word ‘paint,’ either. Balayage is a French term meaning to sweep, scan, or to paint. Unlike ombre coloring, it takes careful consideration of where each highlight will go. And unlike the more highly formatted technique used with foils, the colorist does actually need to become an artist, using spot-on judgment not only when choosing which exact hues to use, as they also do with other techniques, but also their placement and gradation, which is (of course) different on everyone’s hair. The result looks truly sun-kissed rather than created in a chair.
“It does take about 15 minutes longer than a traditional process because it’s not wrapped in a foil that helps it heat up,” explains Shilalis. Is that a downside? Not really, when you consider that the upside is more than worth a few extra minutes; the nuanced, gradual lowlights that balayage creates at the scalp mean no more annoying root lines for months–as opposed to the previous and pesky under-a-month problem.
So basically just like that, you bought yourself some serious time between touch-ups… and far prettier, seemingly straight-from-the-sky color, to boot. In the hands of the right artist, it’s little wonder that, as Shilalis puts it: “More and more people are moving more toward freehand color.”
Checking the mirror on my way out of the salon, I can definitively say this: You can count me among them.
One last note: The above photo, snapped by Andrea Lemelin at Gretta Cole, was a legit ‘no filter.’ That color’s the real deal. To make an appointment for balayage with Jenna or any of the salon’s other talented color artists, get in touch right here.
