Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Hair Colorist Wednesday!: What Hair Color Is Right For Me? - Know Your Level & Tone!

A few blogs back I wrote about Redken's Art Of Consultation. I am going to bring that back into play today. I would like to talk a little bit about how to know your guests or those of you non stylists know your own shade.


There really is an easy process to this. I will break it down step by step to make it easy for you.

First my thoughts:

Prior to my current knowledge I was under the impression that anyone could be any color if the tonal value was correct for their skin/eye tone. As I became a little more vast in the art of color I discovered this is something I know longer believe. Some of you may disagree which is absolutely fine, color is very much a subjective illusion. I can only write my thoughts.

There are many ways to discover someones ideal tonal value for their skin/eye color, which we will discuss in a second.

When you discover the difference of tones and shades it truly is amazing what it does to a person when you find their perfect complimenting tones. As you start to identify these differences you really will begin to see LIFE brought back into the color of the eyes and skin!

Lets break it down:

Step 1: Discover the level. It is important to find what level, meaning how dark/light one should be. The best way to do this is to use your level finder. Place the different levels, with the hair back and out of the face, onto the persons face near the corner of their eye and pay attention to the effect the level has on their eye and skin color.

Step 2: Discover their skin tone (You can do this step first, I prefer to do this second). You are trying to determine whether the person is cool or warm. There are many ways to do this.
1. Use the Redken Art Of Consult skin tone finder.
2. Use both a gold (warm) and a platinum (cool) piece of fabric.
3. Examine the persons eye color.

When doing any of these you are determining which tone compliments their skin color. For instance if you are using fabric, my tool of choice, would be to place the fabric around the person and pay attention to how the fabric compliments their skin and eye, does it brighten and soften them up? Or does the fabric make them look dull?

Need more assistance in this process? I found this article to be very informative. Check It Out!


Step 3: Utilize the knowledge and know what works. If they tend to be warm, utilize warm colors such as coppers, warm reds, golds, etc. If they tend to be cool, utilize cool colors such as cool browns, platinum, mahogany, etc.

Once you have this information you put it all together and it makes formulating easy!! You have norrowed it down to exactly the level and tone that you need. From that point you can utilize color to balance out the facial shape and even have fun with it by incorporating multi-tone coloring that you know works great on your guest!



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