Trend Watch: What is Hair Contouring?
You may have noticed more people walking around with a summer, beach-like look with darker roots and lighter tips. You’ve also probably seen hair colored in a way that looks natural, but has coloring that highlights the face and eyes. How do people pull off this natural looking, feature-focusing hair color?
You may have heard the words “hair contouring” a few years ago thanks to celebrities and stars like the Kardashians, Emma Stone, Gigi Hadid, Giselle Bundchen and Blake Lively popping up with perfectly colored, natural-looking hair. It looks just as beautiful on the red carpet as out and about running errands. While hair coloring to make you look younger and enhance your natural beauty has been around for decades, hair contouring takes it to a new level. As hair contouring continues to be a way to get that unique look that highlights your one-of-a-kind natural features, it is a trend to watch for in 2019. If you’re finishing up a degree at a Utah hair school or are thinking about attending a Utah beauty school, you’ll need to be prepared to know the ins and outs of hair contouring.
What is Hair Contouring?
If you aren’t up on current beauty trends, hair contouring may be new to you. In a nutshell, contouring refers to a dedicated hair coloring service where the specific color and placement of the hair color is unique to each person’s skin tone and facial structure. The purpose is to give each person a customized, unique look that highlights their natural, beautiful features.
This 2019 hair trend has become popular not only because it gives you a look and style that nobody else has, but because it extenuates your best natural features. The need for spending time tediously applying makeup in the morning is a thing of the past.
Hair contouring started in the 1970s in a salon in Paris that used a hair coloring technique called Balayage. This free-hand hair coloring technique adds highlights to the hair in a way that results in a soft, natural gradation so the hair gets lighter towards the ends. The sun bleached look has become a great way to frame and bring attention to your face. From this Balayage hair coloring technique, the use of more colors like ombre, bronde, two-toned and tiger-eye have helped make hair contouring what it is today.
Like Balayage, contouring requires an appointment at a hair salon where a professional hair stylist will free-hand mix a unique shade and highlight color using a custom-made blend of dark and light tones. This will emphasize your unique natural features like eye color, facial structure and skin tone. The hair contouring process often involves two separate trips to the salon with the first appointment resembling more of a consultation where the stylist will examine and note your unique features. The second appointment will be when the specially mixed coloring and highlights are applied.
How You Can Learn Hair Contouring
Hair contouring will undoubtedly be a popular hair and beauty trend in 2019. The idea of achieving a unique one-of-a-kind look helps you feel confident and special. As contoured hair brings attention to the most beautiful features of the face, the time consuming process of applying makeup before you leave home is no longer necessary. With these two advantages of hair contouring, people will be seeking out hair contouring specialists who know what they are doing.
Whether you’re a current hairstylist or an aspiring one, you’ll need to know not only what hair contouring is, but how to do it.
At Taylor Andrews, our Utah hair school students are taught the latest hairstyles and trends, including hair contouring. Being proficient in this popular technique opens many career options whether you open your own hair contouring salon or you want to make yourself a more valuable employee at the salon you’re currently working at. Knowing what hair contouring is and how to blend dark and light shades together specifically for each client will help you market yourself and improve your customer service skills.
Our beauty school is world-recognized and we have excellent job placement rates for graduating students. We offer a flexible class schedule so students can both work and attend courses. We hire professionals in the cosmetology industry to teach our courses. Each class features hands-on experience in addition to traditional classroom instruction. If you’re interested in exploring this 2019 trend of hair contouring, take the first step and contact us today to learn more about our Utah hair school and the courses we offer not just in hair, but in other popular cosmetology specializations such as nail technology, barbering and makeup artistry.
Photo link: Wikipedia