Beauty Tip: Sun-Kissed Hair Color

Any advice for achieving natural-looking summer highlights?

By Emily Hebert

Photo: Courtesy of Eva Scrivo

A brunette with balayage highlights by Eva Scrivo Salon

Given the warmer weather, it's no wonder you want to warm up your hair color, too. But with au naturel tresses being trendy, make sure your highlights are sun-kissed, not streaky. To achieve the former, celebrity colorist Eva Scrivo recommends skipping the foils and coloring your tresses via the balayage method. "With foil highlights, you take a four- to five-inch section of hair at a time-that's how much one foil would have within it-and you wind up overhighlighting because of the square shape and large surface area," she says. "The balayage technique allows for more strategic color placement. You can paint where you please, sectioning off smaller ¼-inch to ½-inch triangular pieces." Another bonus of balayage is that it doesn't involve foils, thereby making it less damaging: "Being a conductor of heat, foil processes more quickly and aggressively, which can cause color to look brassy on brunettes," says Scrivo.

Whether or not you opt for balayage, Scrivo believes that when it comes to summer highlights, less is more. "When you add too many highlights, you have a loss of vitality and the health of hair suffers," says Scrivo. "Plus, your highlights will seem lighter if you leave more dark in; it's the contrast that creates the highlight, so it's important to have richer-colored pieces as well."