JOIN USThe new trend helps you sculpt your look with meticulously placed highlights and lowlights that accentuate your best facial features, writes Swati Gupta
Hair contouring, when done right, frames your face perfectly and brings out your best features. The new trend – contouring – began with facial make-up and took the beauty world by storm.
It then expanded to complete body contouring and got weirder when people started to contour their feet and neck. The craze eventually moved to hair as well.
Pick your palette
But what is hair contouring? It is essentially a process of highlighting and lowlighting certain parts of your mane to either enhance or subdue certain features. It means to sculpt your face with meticulously placed highlights and lowlights which help accentuate your best features.
The darker shades are used to create shadows that make the face look narrower, while lighter colours are used for broadening and lengthening your face since they reflect light.
Hair contouring is done different for each person and the technique depends largely on their hair type, natural colour, facial features, skin tone and personal choices. To begin the procedure, you need to carefully choose the right colour palette based on your skin tone.
An important thing to remember is that there is nothing wrong with the natural colour of your hair or the usual highlights that you get every four to six months.
Colour contouring allows you to keep doing what you are presently doing but with a twist: personalising the base colour or highlights to suit you even better. The change can be as subtle or as dramatic as you would like it to be.
Doing it right
To successfully contour your hair, you must first identify the shape of your face: it can be oval, round, square, diamond or oblong.
On a round face, light tones are generally applied around the hair line, from ear to ear, while darker tones are painted underneath the ears and lower ends of the hair.
The former brightens and elongates the face, while the latter streamlines it. On a square-shaped face, multi-tonal layers of light and dark are applied to the corners, around the jawline and the temples to soften the slightly wider facial features.
On a diamond or oblong face, you would want to widen the facial features. Hence, the stylist would keep the roots and the hair around the nape dark to create shadow at the top of the head and around the jawline.
A single highlight around the face is used to frame it and lighter pieces can be weaved in front of the ears with an ombre effect to make the face look oval.
On a heart or triangle-shaped face, you would like to soften the shape of the chin. Without widening the forehead, the stylist would apply a darker colour to the top of the head and crown areas and will apply lighter pieces free hand to the mid lengths and ends to lighten under the jawline. The section around the hairline is also lightened to highlight the face.
These are just examples to understand how best colour placements can be done to achieve a contouring effect. One must remember to stick to shades which are no more than two shades darker or lighter than the base colour.
Hair contouring is undoubtedly the hottest trend this season and with the arrival of the festive season, it is finding more takers.
(The author is director, Bodycraft Salon)