balayage highlights hair color curly wavy long beautiful

If you’ve seen balayage hair, you know it’s one of the prettiest looks out there. Balayage means “to sweep” or “to paint” in French, and the technique takes a cue from that meaning. It’s a very soft way to brush dye onto hair, resulting in a natural and gradual color change that deepens farther and farther down the hair length.

This gentle technique has also been applied to highlights. What results is a very soft, natural sort of highlighting. Rather than some of the chunkier highlights that were popular back in the 2000s, or the varied wisps that you’ll see from a highlighting cap, these highlights look like they were gracefully painted in, because they were. They usually start sparse and get gradually more noticeable the farther down the length of the hair they go.

Below are some of the best balayage highlighting looks you may want to try yourself.

Caramel Highlights

Caramel balayage highlights on brunette brown hair curls
Image: Pinterest

This look has some light caramel highlights added to the bottom two thirds of the hair in light sections.

Blonde Highlights On Short Hair

blonde highlights on short hair balayage
Image: Pinterest

A great look is to add lightly painted blonde highlights into a bob cut. The lighter highlights won’t look too overbearing in the short hair.

Long Hair With Blonde highlights

long hair with blonde highlights balayage wavy curls
Image: Pinterest

Of course, frosty highlights also look great in long hair. These typically start around a couple inches above the ear.

Reddish Highlights

reddish highlights balayage wavy curly hair
Image: Pinterest

Another look is to add light auburn highlights to brown hair. They can start sparse and get thicker the farther down the hair’s length they go. This look also starts a bit above the ears.

Low Highlights

beautiful woman with dark brunette brown hair with low highlights balayage
Image: Pinterest

Another option is to add some subtle highlights in long hair down around the shoulders and lower. The color should be one or two shades within the natural hair color shade. Kylie Jenner was really rocking this look for a while.

Frosty Highlights

frosty highlights balayage blonde hair
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Sparse, ashy blonde highlights look stunning when starting around the roots. This look can go along with an attractive color melt style, as well.

Sun-kissed highlights

sunkissed blonde highlights balayage on brunette hair wavy curly
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Another stunning look is light highlights in medium blonde. It gives brunette hair a subtle, naturally highlighted look.

Balayage Red Highlights

balayage red highlights curly hair
Image: Pinterest

Red is also a stunning highlight color and lightly painted balayage highlights are no exception.

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