French Girl Balayage
By Hannah Coates for Vogue
Jane Birkin, Caroline de Maigret, Françoise Hardy… Name a chic French woman, and chances are they’re closely associated with an effortlessly aspirational beauty look. Minimal makeup aside, it’s all about those little hairstyle details: A good cut, yes, but also excellent color. French balayage is the technique our Parisian friends swear by for sun-kissed, luminous and natural-looking color that–crucially–doesn’t look done.
“French balayage is a freehand coloring technique that takes its historical roots from the Carita sisters in Paris in the 1970s,” explains Jack Howard, global hair color educator at L’Oréal Pro. You may not have heard of the Carita sisters–Rosy and Maria–but they were Paris’s most in-demand and influential hairdressers in the mid 20th century, tending to the hair of everyone from Catherine Deneuve to Princess Soraya, who became Queen of Iran in 1951. The term “balayage” means “to sweep” in French, and it was a technique the sisters popularised, in a bid to create a natural-looking highlight by working with very fine strands of hair.
While color innovation and tools have undoubtedly evolved since those days, the premise is still very much there, and colorists still paint using the balayage technique on smaller (and larger, sometimes) strands of hair, applying color to pieces where the sun would naturally hit. The goal is for it to look completely natural. “When someone has had French balayage, their hair picks up the light in certain places–it’s understated but still catches the eye,” Howard explains. “You don’t know what you’re looking at, but it brings subtle light and a healthy appearance to the face.”
The opposite of statement hair–a big no-no if you’re French–this kind of balayage suits people of all hair colors, textures and ages. Howard is particularly emphatic that it’s a brilliant technique for those who are going grey. “A few French balayage pieces put through grey hair can really brighten it up, add more dimension and refresh the hairstyle,” he says. “It’s undone and effortless and basically looks like you’ve been on the beach for a few weeks.” It helps to enhance and bring radiance to the skin, too, as an added bonus.
Once the balayage pieces are in, the color can be tweaked using in-salon glosses, which add a healthy shine and deposit a semi-permanent veil (around 20 washes’ worth) of color over the hair. “You can have some fun with it–at the moment, we’re doing lots of cool-toned mocha, as well as pretty wheat shades–nothing ashy though,” Howard says. “Really, you can adapt the shade of hair to read warm or cooler, depending on the look you’re going for.”
Lived-in, chic, and perfect for the approaching spring season, color never looked cooler.
