What are the differences between fashionable types of coloring: airtouch, highlighting, balayage

Oksana Valchevskaya , expert colorist, art director of Long&Short beauty salon

As you noticed, complex hair coloring gained incredible popularity several years ago. Catwalks, red carpets and city streets were filled with girls with all possible coloring options: balayage, shatush, babylight, highlighting, airtouch - just the names make your head spin.

How to understand and distinguish between an endless number of newfangled colors and choose the right one? Let's analyze.

I work as an art director at the Long&Short beauty salon, which specializes in complex coloring. And I observe the following picture: a client, coming to a beauty salon for complex coloring, almost always calls the code word “stretching”. Although often our true desires have nothing to do with this very “stretching”.

All these techniques are partial coloring. And 90% of dyeing is done with bleaching dyes. But each technique is unique in its own way and carries some meaning.

Let's start with airtouch technology

Airtouch, or “air touch” - the name itself suggests that this technique is performed using a hair dryer, due to which the effect is very smooth, soft, with maximally lightened ends. With proper and timely tinting, this coloring will last from 4 months to a year.

The airtouch technique is great for hiding the first gray hair without coloring the entire hair. During correction, after 2-3 months, short hairs that were blown out during the first bleaching are lightened. It preserves hair quality

Classic highlighting

Hair highlighting, English highlights, translated as “light highlights”. It was and always will be a classic. The most commercial coloring in the world. If we talk about technical aspects, then highlighting is a contrasting coloring of individual strands.

When done correctly, the result is a uniform lightening along the entire length of the hair, from roots to ends.

There are many advantages: it hides gray hair, gives a beautiful shimmer of shades, and perfectly “refreshes”. Highlighting visually gives volume to the hair and revitalizes its color, which is very important for not very thick curls.

Balayage

Translated from French, balayage means “to sweep.” The technique received this name due to the fact that during the dyeing process, the dye is applied with chaotic “sweeping” movements, as if painting on the hair. The result is the effect of light strands with soft color transitions, as if the hair was bleached in the sun.

This is an open technique, so the shades after dyeing will be in warm and beige directions. But without styling, balayage is “lost,” so this coloring looks more impressive on curly hair.

So, let's summarize.

All techniques are very beautiful in their own way, each has its own divisions, application and final result. But how do they differ?

Airtouch: smooth relief from the roots and always light ends. Closed technology.

Highlighting: relief from roots to tips. Closed technology.

Balayage: soft lightening. Open technology.