Hair Coloring: Go For A Hair Contouring Like The Stars

Still, looking for the right hair color? Try hair contouring, this technique of coloring and wicks that sculpt the face, adored by the stars, and yet still mysterious. Sandy Ory, an expert colorist at Jean-Marc Joubert, explains the principle and his professional tips.

Do you know makeup contouring? Highlighters are used on the protruding parts of the face to give them relief and underline them, and dark eyeshadows and powders to create shadows that "hollow out" the relief, such as under the cheekbone. It's a bit the same technique for hair coloring. Hair contouring has the same goal: to create optical effects to refine the face. Or even highlight the features of the face by means of nuanced colors according to the areas of the hair.

Sandy Ory, expert colorist at Jean Marc Joubert explains: "To make it softer, we always try to ovalize the face, whether with a cut or via a color, by" correcting "a square jaw, a large front ... For this, we work with shadow areas where we want to dig, and light around what we want to highlight. ". The idea is therefore to structure the face by using highlights, shadows, and light strands to enhance the features, with a somewhat tie and DIY look.

Hair contouring: the art of tailor-made coloring

The practice is highly personalized and thus appeals to stars who ensure a tailor-made color result. “For quality hair contouring, you have to take into account both the shape of the face but also the complexion, the nature of the hair and the cut, and how the hair is placed. »Explains the expert colourist. The advantage of this technique is that it is flexible and meticulous, and it evolves well over time because the effect is not uniform. It also gives the best effect on the screen, useful for video meetings where rebalancing facial volumes through coloring are very effective. "For example, Sarah Jessica Parker, who has a very long face, always keeps dark roots with her balayage to break up the verticality of her features, and light on the sides to flesh out and round her face visually," explains Sandy Ory.

With hair contouring, you can draw the eye to the places you want to highlight, and minimize the rest. "For Keira Knightley, who has a square jaw, it's the other way around: if her lengths were light and root dark, you would only see her jaw. In his case, we will keep shadows on the lower contour of the face to reduce the angles. »Explains Sandy Ory, from the Jean Marc Joubert salon.

For successful hair contouring: subtlety

You don't have to wait for a radical change, hair contouring must be discreet to be successful: it is a work of shadows and lights, not really coloring as we usually hear. "You have to start from the natural base with a balayage effect deployed in the hair, and really work in tone on tone, in the nuances: if it's done well, sometimes it is not directly visible. It brightens the complexion. , brings out the eyes but you shouldn't be able to tell that the client has made a new color. " specifies the colorist.

It’s work in strategic places, with carefully placed bits. We use both products for lightening classic highlights, but also classic coloring applied in locks, playing on the highlights with other pigments, even vegetable colorings, a bit like makeup. "Hair contouring is about light and shadow, not contrast. Shades that are too far away and too different from the natural base or skin tone will create a contrast and not the desired fade effect," explains Sandy Ory.

Valid advice for both browns and blondes. The other mistake would be to make classic strands, from root to tip, too thick or even without nuance. It is for this reason that this is one of the techniques that cannot be done on your own at home. "The ideal when we do a hair contouring is to rework the haircut at the same time so that the placement of the shadows is perfect and corresponds with the placement of the hair. We can also use the cut, an effect degraded by example, to amplify the effects of contouring." finally advises the expert.