Whether you’re blending grays or looking to upgrade your style, experts love these hues and techniques for highlighting every hair type
Highlighting hair can be fickle—the right type of hue and the right blending technique are equally crucial to getting a seamless look. Add grays into the mix, and a whole other layer of trickiness is piled on.
“The biggest rule is to work with the gray, not against it,” says celebrity hairstylist Dimitris Giannetos . “Gray hair creates beautiful dimension when it's blended thoughtfully.” While you may be tempted to stay away from highlights altogether, Giannetos says it’s about adding softness rather than covering every strand. “I always focus on creating a seamless result that brightens the face rather than trying to completely mask every gray hair,” he explains. “The goal is low-maintenance, healthy-looking color that grows out naturally.”
Look to celebrities like Jennifer Lopez and Victoria Beckham, who were both just spotted at Wimbledon in London sporting highlights. Lopez opted for more subtle bronde highlights, while Beckham brought back a somewhat older highlight trend: ombré, featuring dark roots with lighter ends.
Giannetos also just created a highlight masterpiece on Penélope Cruz by expertly placing various blond hues throughout brunette hair to add seamless dimension.
Ahead, three stylist-approved highlighting techniques to show to your colorist at your next salon appointment, whether you’re looking to hide gray hairs or give your hair a subtle upgrade.
Giannetos loves utilizing “babylights” to create a natural transition between natural hair color and grays. “Fine, strategically placed highlights around the face and throughout the crown help make gray regrowth much less noticeable than a traditional all-over color,” he says. The stylist demonstrated this on Cruz by putting various blond tones throughout the head while allowing her natural brunette shade to shine through underneath. Since the highlights are superfine and more frequent, they cover grays from every angle—whether you’re wearing your hair in an updo, with a side part, or down and sleek.
The key when coloring any mature hair is keeping the highlights fine, as demonstrated with babylights. This creates a softer, more modern finish, Giannetos explains, adding that “chunky highlights can emphasize contrast and make regrowth appear more obvious.”
Plus, celebrity colorist and founder of Highbrow Hippie, Kadi Lee, says chunky highlights won’t cover grays adequately. “With mature hair, gray never grows in as a solid block; it grows in unevenly, so the highlight needs to mimic that same pattern,” she explains. “I always go by the rule of a ‘soft beginning,’ or hair should whisper at the roots and shout at the ends.” Lee will always keep highlights thin on top (especially to blend in with finer gray strands) and focus thicker highlights on the midshafts to ends, à la Victoria Beckham’s current style.
The most obvious choice when covering grays with highlights is to use a technique called gray blending, which uses light hues as a transition between grays and your natural color. For good reason, colorists always gravitate toward this method. “Gray blending is a great technique because it helps eliminate unnecessary damage to the hair when it's already in a delicate state,” Lee says. “The goal is for the lightened pieces to blend thoughtfully with the gray, so you can't tell where the color ends and the natural hair begins.” Lee ut…