There are gazillion ways to get your hair dyed and you are never bound to opt for a run-of-the-mill hair color. Balayage hair highlights have gained immense popularity in the previous few decades and yet all-over-color has never gone out of fashion. So, what to look for?
Here’s how you differentiate between highlights and all-over-color.
All-over-color gives you a mono-dimensional look while highlights give you a multidimensional look
It’s the basic thing to learn. When you choose to get all-over-color, you are giving priority to a single shade for all your hair and on the other hand, when you choose to lean toward highlights, you are surely meant to give your natural hair a slight touch of another color — it could be metallic brown, chocolate brown, beige, silver-gray or any color of your choice. You are not at the verge of losing the very natural color of your hair while opting for highlights.
All-over-color involves ammonia while highlighting your hair means applying bleach
You must have seen how stylists do the prep for highlights, they segregate and organize your hair first, and then apply a decent amount of bleach on it and lastly cover it with aluminum foils. Instead of bleach, the main ingredient in all-over-color or single-process is ammonia which is said to be measly harmful for your hair.
Unlike single-process, highlights can never be permanent
Everything has a lifespan after which they fade, isn’t it? Same is the case with highlights. If you don’t get your hair highlighted, they’re going to vanish in a couple of months or so. You can never expect highlights to stay forever, in case you want them to linger you would have to visit your colorist after every 6-8 weeks for a touchup.
On the contrary, to your amusement, all-over-color tends to be permanent. To be more precise, there are three different ways of getting your hair colored via single-process:
Permanent single-process
This one tends to stay the longest. If you are simply unhappy with the original color of your hair and you wanna change it from the scratch, you gotta go with a permanent all-over-color.
Demi-permanent single-process
In case you are just dabbling into single-process and you do not want your hair’s original color to fade forever and if you don’t want the dye to be long-drawn, you should opt for a demi-permanent hair color. It is gonna be washed off in a series of showers — you shampoo your hair for 24-30 times and you’ll find it gone.
Highlights do not change the natural color of your hair while single-process does
Highlights only blend with the natural and original color of your hair; they, by no means, tend to overshadow it while on the other hand, a single-process changes the way your hair looks 360 degree. For instance, if you already have black hair and you’ve decided to go all blonde — you’ll have to get each strand of your hair colored. There’s no blending, there’s no fusion — just monotonality.
All-over-color provides you a wide variety of shades but not styles. Highlighting provides both
When it comes to highlighting, there aren’t just a couple of shades to skim through, you can rummage through a host of styles too.
There are at least 4 types of highlights you can get:
- Balayage: is basically known as the perfect way to bag a sun-kissed look. It is also called free-hand painting because there are no hard and fast rules for it.
- Lowlights: offer your hair repeated strokes of dark color (let it be any)
- Chunking: offers vast swaths of your hair painted in one color or the other.
- Foil highlighting: offers a host of stripes of an unvarying color, and is perhaps one of the oldest methods to color your hair.
Here’s how you spot similarities between all-over-color and highlights
Demi-permanent single-process and highlights stay for an equal amount of time
If you shampoo your hair twice a week, 24 washes are equal to 3 months, so to say.
Both have the option to darken or lighten your colored locks available
Yes, both allow the option either to darken or lighten your hair dye but there are different methods for it.
Both highlights and single-process can look natural but in very different ways
If an all-over-color is done with total perfection, it can never look artificial or sham. And, highlights (especially balayage) are generally known to add a natural sun-kissed touch to your hair.
Both of them have few things in common which clearly implies that you won’t be left barehanded no matter which option you bend towards. Moreover, on the basis of differences, you can easily prefer one over the other. Choose a top rated hair salon Rockville to get your hair done gorgeously.
