Balayage Gone Bad: When a Picture is Not Worth 1,000 Words

by Ramona Emerson

Getty Images
Getty Images

As part of my ongoing quest to re-create a life-changing highlighting experience I had three years ago, I arrived at a cool Brooklyn salon with an 8x10 color printout of Elizabeth Olsen dutifully clutched in my fist.


I sat down and somewhat sheepishly showed the picture to the stylist--it always feels insane to ask a human person if they can make you look like a celebrity at a red-carpet event, but it's way harder to find a picture of a normal-looking person with highlights exactly like Olsen's.

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Besides showing her the picture, I kept repeating the words "balayage," "bright," and "not brassy" like some kind of crazed parrot. Through all this idiocy, the stylist, who was so nice and had really pretty hair (always a good sign), nodded in understanding and said, indicating the picture, "We can definitely get pretty close to that." I took this to mean, "We can definitely get pretty close to that."

An hour later, as I was sitting in the chair post blow-dry, I was decidedly less sure what she had meant. It wasn't that it was bad per se, but it was just not even a little bit like the picture. Of course I wasn't going to emerge with Olsen's exact highlights, but what I had wasn't even in keeping with the spirit of Olsen's highlights. If she didn't think it would look like the picture, she should have told me. I would have been disappointed, but I can take it!

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The colorist and I studied each other warily in the mirror. Finally I said, "It kind of sort of doesn't really look a lot like the picture?" (Has anyone ever been so meek?) She agreed in a half-hearted way that made me nervous, and we set up an appointment for her to fix it. But the next day I called the manager and asked if someone else could do it. She was nice and had really pretty hair, but I just didn't feel like we were on the same page--or, for that matter, looking at the same picture.

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