Herringbone Highlights For Grey Hair, New Trend

The last few years have seen a huge number of women consider growing out their grey hair. Clients lacked of access to salons and many people working remotely. It was a perfect time to attempt an escape from the upkeep involved in maintaining hair color. While some made it all the way grey, many were surprised when it didn’t work out as well as they hoped.

In lots of cases, the problem wasn’t necessarily the grey. Often, it was actually the lack of it. The ultra white  look they visualized ended up more like their natural color with just a bit of grey, creating an overall drab feel. Since most people grey around the front first, it’s easy to think it will all be that white. Clients are often surprised that they have almost no white hair on the entire back of their head.

Sometimes the challenge is the overall lightness of the hair. When someone goes too blond, for example, the hair and the skin can be too close in color. The effect is a “washed out” result, which does nothing to accentuate the better features of the eyes and face. Grey can do the same thing. Often more so when you add the fact that grey hair has less warmth that pigmented hair.

Other times the tone is to blame. Natural hair has an element of warmth. Most skin tones need at least a little warmth to compliment and balance the color. Most skin tones look best with more neutral to warm tones than ashy ones. Even skin that looks best with cooler tones need a bit of balance.

All of these situations can make the overall effect feel more old than liberating. As tempting as it can be to just go back to what your colorist was doing before, there are options to look at before undoing all your hard earned grey hair.

Enter the trend of “Herringbone” highlights. As much as it sounds like a fancy application technique, herringbone highlights is simply incorporating your grey hair into the highlighting scheme. Rather than highlight and color all the hair in the background, try adding blonde or a light brown in with the grey. The highlights add a bit of warmth and dimension to balance out the color. The grey adds some cool tones for contrast.

Sometimes the overall grey is a bit too light. Herringbone highlights of a dark blond or light brown in the mix can bring the level down and create some contrast between the hair and skin.

If excessively drab and cool tones are the issue, a slightly warmer tone can be herringboned into the hair to make it more complimentary to your skin tone.

Other times, highlights throughout can bring the background color lighter. They bring the grey and the dark together in a more harmonious way.

Which ever way you go, you’ll create a more youthful, pleasing hair color, without the high maintenance of coloring all over. Please visits our hair color services page and call for an appointment today.