Archived Post
Rant & Rave: Hair Highlights
This Week’s Topic: HAIR HIGHLIGHTS!
Your Mission: Tell us what you love, hate, or are otherwise indifferent to about hair highlights. What drives you bananas? What makes them necessary?
Explore Temptalia
We're here to help you make better beauty purchases that you'll enjoy and love! We recommend signing up to take advantage of personalized features like tracking products you own, viewing dupes that you already have, and more!
Here are some useful resources for you:
Compare Any Two
Curious how two shades compare to each other? Type in the shades below to get instant side-by-side swatches!
20 Comments
Comments that do not adhere to our comment policy may be removed. Discussion and debate are highly encouraged but we expect community members to participate respectfully. Please keep discussion on-topic, and if you have general feedback, a product review request, an off-topic question, or need technical support, please contact us!
Please help us streamline the comments' section and be more efficient: double-check the post above for more basic information like pricing, availability, and so on to make sure your question wasn't answered already. Comments alerting us to typos or small errors in the post are appreciated (!) but will typically be removed after errors are fixed (unless a response is needed).
We appreciate enthusiasm for new releases but ask readers to please hold questions regarding if/when a review will be posted as we can't commit to or guarantee product reviews. We don't want to set expectations and then disappoint readers as even products that are swatched don't always end up being reviewed due to time constraints and changes in priorities! Thank you for understanding!
Comments on this post are closed.
We try to approve comments within 24 hours (and reply to them within 72 hours) but can sometimes get behind and appreciate your patience! 🙂 If you have general feedback, product review requests, off-topic questions, or need technical support, please contact us directly. Thank you for your patience!
I hate hate hate when I see platinum highlights on girls with dark brown/black hair. Highlights are supposed to look natural and that just makes it look like they have noodles stuck in their hair. If you want highlights, go for a more subtle and natural choice. There are more options out there than just blonde!
This, this and this! It can even look like someone has grey hair, not something you want. One or 2 shade ligther is way more flatering.
I Love Love Love highligts in my otherwise “dirty” blonde hair but… the 4 hours it takes to get it done every 7 weeks is literally a pain in the A$$. I’ve tried all over color (one tone) but it’s just not the same 🙁
I agree! Highlights are easier to maintain- I get mine done every 3 months or so. (I’ve been letting mine grow out a bit though because $$$ is tight right now…) Anyways, the downside is that they are pricey/time consuming. I also tried all over color and it just doesn’t look good on me.
I used to love getting really dramatic blonde highlights, but my natural color is quite nuanced on its own, and I’ve come to prefer that look.
RAVE: I got highlights a while back (May 2010) i have dark kind of chestnut colored hair with slight red reflects when the sun shines on it (I have scottish and irish roots, half my family is ginger, so i guess that’s why) and I got kind of honey and caramel colored highlights put in. At first they were a bit too light, so my hair stylist came back in a couple of days after and darkened them a bit. They looked really natural and didn’t take too long. Once they started to grow out too much, I asked my haristylist (Karen) what to do. She said if I didn’t want to keep them, to die over them. So I did with my natural hair color, with semi permanent dye. By the time it wore off, my hair had grown enough and now it looks like just the ends of my hair are lighter, which I like 🙂
RANT: when people get highlights that are too light for them! They should look natural and add dimension, not look like you bleached a few strands for fun. I hate seeing girls with mid t dark brown hair with all one color, platinum highlights. It doesn’t look nice, and it washes you poor beauties out!
MY TIPS: Don’t get just one color put in. Get 2-3 tones minumum, each a shade lighter than the other if you know what I mean. That gets you the sunkissed look 🙂
lovely topic! i have hot hot hot pink strands in my hair and i love it! :o) i bleached some strands and then used a dye all over my hair…and it colored only the bleached strands. after a couple of months i got so used at it that now i feel like pink is the most natural color on me! :o)
I tried dyi higlights in caramel from L’Oreal. This was before halloween and my students said I looked like a pumpkin. Sad thing is that they were right. I give up on highlight kits
I first got highlights when I was in my mid-late teens. It was done professionally, looked natural and just gave my dark dirty blond hair a nice light boost.
Many years later when I was around 19, I had my mother do some at home high lights. The color was also meant to be quite natural looking. I am no sure if something got mixed up in packaging, or what the hell happened. But when I washed it all out I was left with a ‘snow cap’. About 3 inches of my roots where a brilliant platinum blond! With similarly colored bits throughout the rest of my hair. Neither of us had any idea what went wrong, as my mother has been dying hair for family members since her teenage years and is more then capable of the process.
Luckily I talked my mother into doing this on a Saturday instead of waiting until Sunday (with School on Monday for me) so the next day she took me to a professional to get it all fixed! The stylists where absolutely shocked and could only surmise we had used too much on my hair and it ‘melted’ about when I washed it out.
I’d like to get some highlights someday. After my worst experience last week in my seven years of experience in bleaching my own hair blonde, I’m thinking of going back to my dark Asian hair roots in a few weeks. However, I worry it might be too boring so I’m thinking of getting highlights. I doubt I’m going for the natural look, though!
Everyone in Indonesia has naturally dark hair and the “ideal” hair is long, thick, very black, and very straight. So boring. :/
The first time I got highlights was as a bday from my sis in law last year. I have dark brown hair and wanted super subtle reddish highlights only a few shades lighter than my natural color. My SIL thought it would be cool to “surprise” me by telling the stylist that I wanted to go much lighter but was afraid to say so. Oh boy, was I very surprised when I saw my nearly blonde highlights! Grrr! SIL paid the hefty pricetag and I tried to “get used to it”… Nope! Two weeks later, I dyed over it. And liked the results much better. I didn’t touch them up at all though until my bday thus year. Needless to say, I didn’t bring my SIL with me. Now I have natural looking highlights and love them!!
When I had my natural hair color (dishwater blonde), I really needed to get highlights. If I didn’t, my hair was so ashy that it always looked dirty. :/ My stylist was great, and we foiled every six or eight weeks. The nice thing about them was that they looked natural, so if I didn’t go in for a while, it didn’t look ridiculous – just that I had been in the sun, gotten some natural highlights, and then hadn’t been in the sun lately!
Now that I’m not my natural color anymore (was dark dark brunette for about a year and a half, and now I’m a true pomegranate red that fades to a mid auburn), I don’t get them anymore.
I do agree with some other posters – not a fan of the blonde highlights in brown hair look. I do LOVE funky colored highlights in dark hair, though! If I wasn’t doing the whole attorney thing, I’d have jet black hair with hot pink highlights and bangs. 🙂
Rant: When others get their panties in a bunch over obvious or unusual highlights. If natural is your thing, rock it. But don’t make others who like something a little more prominent or odd feel bad.
Rave: I love love LOVE unusual colored highlights, I just switched from blonde ones to blue ones.
I totally agree about the unusual colored highlights!
I went back to my natural dark brown (which my tips are still really light from where the bleached part wasn’t dyed dark enough) last year after a year and a half of it being blond or whatever crazy color I felt like. I’m looking to do pink highlights now, because I still want the fun pop of color without as much upkeep.
I love highlights of all kinds – natural, unnatural, i dont care! i had auburn hair with strawberry blonde highlights all summer, and recently got my hair deepened to a dark, dark cool red with burgundy highlights. its not natural at all, but who cares? i love it!
my only gripe are blonde highlights that are poorly toned. unnatural colors are awesome and you shouldnt be afraid to rock em – however, nothing is worse than untoned, orange or yellow highlights that look like a bleach job gone horribly wrong.
RANT: hate most highlights. very few people get them done so they enhance their complexion. platinum on dark brown or black is the worst, but a close second is varied cool blonde tones that truly clash with each other and the warmer base hair color. and finally, highlights on a stacked or inverted bob may just be the mullet of our era.
I like subtle highlights , only one or two shades lighter than the rest of the hair,
but I really hate blonde highlights on dark hair, so 90s !
It depends on how it’s done and who’s wearing it. On some women, I really like highlights that provide a strong contrast with their natural color; on other women, I think a more natural blend is better. I think the one look that I just cannot bring myself to like is the platinum stripping on women with deeply tanned skin. Not women with naturally dark skin – that’s fine. But for women who are blatantly over-tanned, the unnatural blonde coloration just creates a whole look of “processed” to me.
I would love to get highlights, but I have black hair. I’m tired of my hair looking dull. Any suggestions?!
I love getting highlights in my hair because it give my hair more dimension without changing it too much. the downside is that they require so much maintenance ( $$, time, toning, roots) and sometimes it just sucks 🙁