balayage

n. a technique of painting highlights onto hair. Subjects: English, Apparel, Appearance, & Fashion

Editorial Note: Often spelled balliage in English. Etymological Note: From the French balayage, meaning the act of “sweeping.”

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Citations: 1974 Angela Taylor New York Times (Apr. 1) “Color Your Hair Simply, or Turn It Blue—Salons Can Do It All” p. 36: The shop has imported a young man named Yvan from the Carita salon in Paris to do what he calls a “balayage au cotton.” Starting at the nape, Yvan lifted out fine strands and applied a lightening paste with a thin brush. Instead of the usual foil wrapping, he tucked pieces of cotton wadding to support the strands in process and keep them from the rest of the hair. When he was three-quarters through, he had used 1,000 feet of cotton stripping and Miss Weston looked as though she were wearing an enormous white wig. The idea of the balayage (the word means sweeping) is to lighten fine strands of hair, rather than add color. 1990 Roxanne Washington Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) (Oct. 21) “Makeover of the Month”: The salon used a color technique called Balayage to gently cover part of the gray and leave the rest exposed, lending a more realistic finish than harsh, unnatural-looking all-over color. 1995 Elizabeth Lenhard Atlanta Constitution (Georgia) (Apr. 23) “Tackling a lust for red head-on” p. L/3: Balliage: A technique in which color is painted freehand onto sections of hair. 2002 Catherine Callaway, Miles O'Brien (CNN) (Aug. 17) “Saturday Morning: Haircuts on a Budget”: We just did a balliage…technique with a prelightener, and brought it up to a little bit of a gold and run some styling paste through it, Redken, and it’s absolutely easy and moveable and restylable during the day, and it really shows off the texture and the dimension in the hair. 2006 Nikki Yazxhi Daily Telegraph (Surry Hills, New South Wales, Australia) (Nov. 19) “Simply summer”: The way to achieve sun-kissed summer colour this season is with the Balayage technique, a European paint-on colouring method. It creates worn-in, sun-kissed, highlights that mimic the way the sun lightens your hair. It adds masses of beachy texture and complements any style. 2006 David Evangelista CBS News (Nov. 20) “The Early Show: Hot Hair Trends For Fall: Bold”: After rinsing the color out, Norika applied thin wisps of highlights throughout her hair using a technique called “balliage” (basically, just sweeping highlights through the hair in a natural way; no chunks of color here).

Posted 24 Nov 06 | Permalink | Tell a Friend

Reader comments:

where in cleveland ohio is this technique called balliage done…do you have the name of a salon? have been looking for months…thanks for your help.
-ginny

by virginia jones 19 May 07, 0220 GMT