There are many benefits of adding highlights to your hair. If you don't want to color your entire mane and are looking for an easy and attractive way to give your tresses a makeover, highlights can come quite handy. The right color highlights can add that extra oomph to your hairstyle, make your mane look voluminous and help to draw attention your facial features. However, when choosing color highlights for your hair, it's worth remembering these dos and don'ts to achieve the best results:
The Dos
Placement
Correct placement is of utmost importance while streaking your hair with bright color highlights. For a natural looking effect, always get thicker chunks of bright highlights to frame your face and dark and sparse streaks at the roots. The tips of your hair should be lighter too, just like a subtle ombre. Correctly placed and evenly distributed evenly highlights lend a balanced color accent to your mane and make your strands shine with brilliance when exposed to light.
Amount
Over highlighted hair is as good as dyeing your entire mane; besides looking like a home job gone wrong, it lends the impression of a single color and makes the streaky effect look flat and worn out.
Highlights must always accentuate the natural color or the base color of your hair. Therefore, it is important to get the thickness of the streaks just right, so that they don't overpower the base color. If you have thick, voluminous hair, get medium-thick color highlights throughout your mane. But if you have fine hair, get thin streaks sprinkled all over your mane to create an impression of multiple tones, depth and volume.
Choice
The next important thing to bear in mind is the choice of colors. Your highlights should always match your hair's base tone. If you have a warm base such as dark brown, get a warm highlight like honey blonde. Similarly, if you have a cool base, such as ash brown, go for beige or sandy streaks. If your base color is neutral, you can choose either warm or cool highlights. Before going for streaks, do consult your hair colorist to know more about pairing your hair's base color with highlights.
Care
Color highlights are a great investment and should be treated like any other prized possession. Give them the proper care they deserve to make the color last longer and shimmer brilliantly. Use a low-sulfate color protection shampoo and conditioner to wash and moisturize your highlighted hair.
The Don'ts
Too many colors
While color highlights add a lot of dimension to your mane, multi-colored streaks may make the overall result look unnatural. Unless you want to go for rainbow hair, stick to a highlight and a low light. Together with the base color of your hair, these accentuated streaks will add a multi-tonal effect to your strands, making them look gorgeous.
Too light colors
Carefully selected color highlights not only accentuate the base color of your hair but also provide an attractive contrast to your skin tone – making your face as well as your hairstyle stand out. Very light highlights, whether on light hair or dark hair, make the streaky effect look pale and unnatural. For best results, make sure your highlights are not more than three shades lighter than the base color of your hair. If you have very light base color, go for warmer highlights so that the accents don't look too washed out.
Same color round the year
There's absolutely no fun in sporting the same highlights throughout the year. Go for bright and light highlights during summer and choose warm, golden streaks in winter. As highlights begin to fade out, you need to touch them up to make them look fresh and appealing. Experimenting with different colors leaves little room for mistakes in terms of matching the previous colors. Plus, you get a hair makeover too!
