There’s a world of brown hair out there and people who want to keep that hair brown but maybe just make it pop a little more. One of the best ways to do that without completely changing the style and overall color of the hair is to start playing with highlights and lowlights. Now, we know a lot of you colorists like to put a buckshot of unicorn vivids on every head you see, and that’s cool, but sometimes you need to stop and appreciate what can be done with regular ol’ shades of brown. Because not everyone wants to wipe their natural brunette hair away to go grey fox or put a rainbow of pastel on their head.
Pixie Highlights
There are a lot of tough things about this pixie by Amanda Mae that make it really remarkable. First, just styling any pixie cut successfully is tough, but Amanda has made this work really well with the loose side part. None of the angles are too tight so that even though the hair is so short it comes off very casually. The streaks of light (almost blonde) highlights Amanda painted give the loose casual look a striking definition and lifts it to that memorable leve.
Brunette Balayage
This is a full blooded balayage, complete with a wavy cascade of brunette locks and caramel highlights. Emily Belcher pulled the blend of colors off perfectly. She wasn’t afraid to paint widely within the brown spectrum so you get a hugely dynamic range of of color, creating a collage you can stare at for hours because because there’s always some new spectacular combination of brown melting into a curl of caramel.
Long Brown Hair with Babylights
Katie’s balayage with babylights really shows an expertise at shaping. For all it’s wild look, this is actually a really well thought out hair style. There’s not a whole lot of different colors at work, but the styling of the hair and placement of highlights amplify the colors. The way all the hair seems to be going wherever it wants to, but still falls into a shape that conforms to a certain wild logic is a sign of some pretty expert styling.
Brunette Lowlights and Balayage
Vena Love creates a lot of hairstyles that go way out into the fringes of vivid color, so when she decides to do something more… Well, we don’t want to say normal. Almost nothing she does is ever strictly “normal,” but to see what she does with natural brown colors is to see a shining example of an intensely creative mind tempered by expert professionalism. In this case, Vena made a vibrant piece with a caramel base color and an accentuating composition of lowlights. The whole of the style is a gentle combination of two main colors, woven together in long flowing hair in perfect condition.