There’s a time and a place for all things.

We are huge fans of babylights and foilyage. BUT we have all had times in our life when commitments leave us a little bit less available to give our highlights the care and attention they need.

Maintaining the tone you like over pre-lightened sections involve regular applications of a toner or semi-permanent colour. Toners or semi-permanent colour are used to deposit tone or colour over highlights.

If your schedule or budget doesn’t allow you to keep up with highlights or balayage, the time has come to fill and cover them.

Pre-lightened sections have had pigments stripped from them. Often they have been toned or coloured with a cool based colour. This means that they are specifically missing warm pigments.

If you apply an all-over significantly darker colour, or a cool toned colour over highlights/balayage, you risk seeing a patchy or green toned colour result.

Successfully colouring over pre-lightened sections requires two steps. You first need to fill the tone of your lighter sections, creating a balanced base. This will then give you a beautiful, consistent final colour result when you apply your final colour.

The best approach to filling highlights/balayage:

Colouring with a neutral colour which is darker than your current lighter colour (closer to your natural colour) will add depth and fill missing pigments. If you want to add more than two levels of depth, then you can do that in stages. Neutral colours will restore the right balance of pigments to your base.

If you then want to add cool or warm tones, you can do that with a subsequent colour application. You will see a better final colour result if you have balance the tone and restored missing pigments with a neutral colour initially.

Talk to our colourists for personalised recommendations on how you can add depth and achieve a gorgeous colour result when you cover your highlights or balayage.

Thanks for the helpful information! Very happy with your colours.

S. Patel