Highlights, Lowlights or Babylights?

Colour - 23 January 2024

◴ Read time - 5 mins

What’s the difference? Highlights, Lowlights & Babylights

If you want to have multiple tones running through your hair, then highlights, lowlights and babylights are for you! Your stylist can introduce beautiful shades to your colour, adding gorgeous lighter and darker tones to create a stunning finished look.

But which technique is right for you? Luckily, with help from our colour partner Wella, we’re on hand to delve into the world of colour and tell you everything you need to know, so you can discover your hair’s hidden depths.

Highlights | Credit: www.pinterest.co.uk

Highlights

Highlights work for both subtle changes and big, dramatic statements; that’s why we love them! They are the perfect way to enrich your natural colour. Highlights are woven or sliced sections of hair that you would like to lift lighter than your natural colour. If you’re a brunette, you can add highlights that are a lighter brown, or blonde. If you are already blonde, blonde highlights embrace lighter blonde shades. Often, highlights are only perceived as blonde colouring, but if you are asking for any colour lighter than your base colour, you are entering the wonderful world of highlights.

When Should I Ask for Highlights?

When you want to brighten your colour or add dimension and movement to your base colour.

With the dark root stretch trend starting to date, highlights are back and brighter than ever! Celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon, Margot Robbie and Blake Lively are great champions of this trend. Treat yourself to the Wella Invigo Cool Blonde Recharge range to brighten and keep your blonde sheer this season.

Lowlights | Credit: www.pinterest.co.uk

Lowlights

Unlike highlights, which are lighter than the base colour, lowlights are hints of colour darker than your base colour, which are woven into the hair. This colouring technique creates a perception of depth to the hair and adds contrast – perfect for people with finer hair who want their locks to look thicker. It is also great to introduce a lowlight technique when hair becomes overly light and lacks dimension from regular highlighting. Anyone who has blonde or light brown hair make excellent candidates for lowlights. If your hair is black or very dark naturally, then lowlights will not work for you, because it will be tricky to find a lowlight darker than your natural colour.

When Should I Ask for Lowlights?

When you want to add a perception of depth, contrast and texture to your colour, or if your hair is feeling too light.

Never underestimate the power of adding depth within hair colour. The clever use of a chocolate hue can easily act as padding and add fullness to your luscious locks. Eva Mendez and Jennifer Aniston certainly fly the lowlighting flag!

Babylights | Credit: www.pinterest.co.uk

Babylights

This season’s must-have subtle and contouring hair trend. For babylights, only a small amount of your hair is used and there are only tiny separations in between foils. Babylights are micro-fine woven highlights placed around your hairline and over your parting. Babylights are cleverly placed using the minimum amount of hair needed to enhance or contour your look. This technique can be applied to any hair colour or hair type, blondes, brunettes and redheads can all embrace this trend! But the best thing about babylights? They’re low-maintenance! When your hair grows out, the style looks softer and subtler because the highlights are so fine. Less is more!

When Should I Ask for Babylights?

When you want a low-maintenance, natural looking colour.

There’s no softer way to enhance your hair with minimum maintenance this season than with the use of babylights. Babylights on a parting can be added to an old balayage or ombré style to re-energise and add sophistication to your signature blonde style. Gigi Hadid & Rosie Huntington-Whiteley always rock this look of elegance.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all technique and many stylists will add in a few lowlights with highlights to add dimension and then weave in a few babylights at your parting to soften the re-growth or use highlights to frame your face but then use lowlights to give the main body of your hair a little more dimension. The possibilities are endless and completely tailor-made for the final look you want to achieve.

Find out more…

Contact your local Francesco Hair Salon to book in for a bespoke consultation and explore which colour techniques will work for you.