By Sarah Schreiber, Good Housekeping
Remember getting your hair
colored in the '90s? Foil highlights (of the chunky variety) were the
name of the game — and that crisp line between your roots and your fresh
color was a badge of honor.
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Angeles colorist Kari Hill — a blond expert who's worked with
bombshells like Michelle Williams, Anna Faris and Karlie Kloss — is here
to make sure that '90s hair stays in
the '90s. Her go-to trick? A process called gloss smudging, which
effectively eliminates the "obvious" area between roots and color,
resulting in the most natural color job yet.
"Think of it almost like an eyeliner with a smudger at the end," Hill explained to Refinery 29,
which actually sums up the process pretty well. After the hair is
highlighted and washed out, the colorist applies a toner or gloss to just the roots with a brush, effectively "smudging" or blurring where roots end and color begins.
"I smudge everyone who
walks in the door," Hill said of the technique. By anyone, she really
means anyone. While she's perfected the technique for blondes,
"smudging" can be done on any color, as long as you're going lighter.
Softening dark brown locks with mahogany highlights? Smudge away.
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It gets better, though.
Besides adding a natural filter to your highlights, smudging actually
extends your time between touch ups. "It actually buys you time between
appointments," Hill said. "When we first started doing it, we called it
'recession hair.'"
Because the toner actually
takes a few months to fade out, as your roots grow, there's no telltale
highlight "line" to give them away. Your color looks like your younger
self's hair a few months after a summer on the beach — still your shade, just better and brighter.
