Our highlights kit and accessories bundle include everything you need to create beautifully soft face-framing highlights or babylights at home. You can also achieve a soft, naturally sun-kissed balayage effect in your lengths with foils – foilyage!
Highlights add softness, and a light-catching, vibrant dimension to your colour.
Highlights:
Achieving lighter sections in your colour is a two-step process. After weaving and lightening your highlights you then apply a toner to balance and finish your highlights.
Highlights are achieved by isolating strands of hair, which are painted with a lightening formula and wrapped in foils for processing. Foil conducts heat better than the open air, allowing for more lift.
Our highlight kits are customised just for your colour goals and can be created with cool or warm tones. Blonde highlights are typically finished with a cool-based toner which mutes warmth and leaves a tonally balanced finish. Brighter golden, copper or mahogany tones can look particularly striking against a darker natural base colour. Hints of copper on a golden blonde base leave a stunning soft strawberry finish.
We recommend that you get started with just 15 foils around the frontline and crown to frame the face and soften your overall colour. If you wanted more highlights, add foils along the sides and back of your head in a second application. Our highlights kit can be used for about 30-50 foil applications, which can be applied in stages, so you don’t need to apply all the highlights at once.
Babylights:
Babylights are technically described as a ‘superfine weave pattern’. We prefer babylights! They are created by isolating very thin strands for lightening, creating a very natural, softer finish with a reflective finish which blends beautifully with your base colour.
Babylights are super fine highlights which maximize dimension and shine throughout the hair, adding movement and visual volume to your hair. They leave a luminous, reflective natural looking glow.
Get started with just a 1/4 head of babylights, which is manageable when colouring at home, and which will give you a soft, flattering colour around your face.
Foilyage:
Foilyage is a colouring technique that blends traditional use of foils with the freehand sweeping application style of balayage, creating a natural look with darker roots and lighter ends. Using the highlight weave technique to isolate strands of hair, foilyage creates diffuse, blended lighter lengths. The lightener is only applied to the lower sections of the hair, leaving the upper section untouched.
A balayage colour effect is low maintenance because the darker roots allow for longer intervals between touch-ups and there isn’t a clear regrowth line.
Highlights Kit:
Our Highlights Kit include everything you need to create highlights, including:
- lightening kit to lighten your strands
- toner or semi-permanent colour kit to deposit tone or colour on your lightened sections
- easy to follow illustrated instructions
You will also need our Highlights Accessories Bundle, which includes a reusable pintail comb, 4 alligator clips and a box of professional foils.
Why Foils?
Foil conducts heat better than open air or plastic film, allowing the product to infiltrate deeper into the hair. This results in more lift, making it easier to control the colour application.
Application:
We’ve simplified the process with step-by-step illustrated instructions to guide you and the tools and products you need to get a soft, natural look.
Textured Hair:
If you are applying highlights to curly hair, it is best to lighten thicker slices of hair, so that you have full coils of hair which are lighter. Super fine babylights will get lost in curls, and the overall effect will be minimal.
We are happy to help!
Our colourists can answer any of your questions about highlights, and help you select your toner or semi-permanent colour, and we’re available 7 days a week!
After colouring my hair at home for over twenty years, this is by far the best colour I have come across. Covered my greys exceptionally well, left my hair feeling very healthy and absolutely love the blonde colour.
Justine Day
Love, love, love my new hair! The amazing colourist helped me make a selection and I now have beautiful hair which I am proud of. Thank yoU!
Amanda Letcher
I have tried various products but I am truly impressed with The Shade! The fact that its cruelty free, vegan, reasonably priced, or excellent quality and easy to use gets my stamp of approval.
Tracey Rose
Is it easy enough to do your own foils or best to have someone else do it?
Hi! We include illustrated step-by-step instructions to help keep the highlights process manageable. You can get a friend to help if you wish. The highlights application does get easier with a little practice, and it can be worth practicing and building the skills and confidence to apply your own highlights. In our instructions we walk you through the initial slice, weave and foil process and ask that you practice this before you apply any product at all. When you are comfortable with that process you then apply the lightener. So with this approach you do practice the highlights technique before you begin applying the lightener, and this builds the confidence to then comfortably apply your own highlights. The confidence and skills then build quickly, and then you will be applying your own highlights easily and achieving the softer, lighter highlights look yourself, at home (which can be very satisfying!).