BALAYAGE // Hair Transformation

Recently my hair underwent a big refresh ready for spring and summer.

My 'before' hair had the remainders of ombre/balayage from years prior. It was brassy and warm toned and NOT how i wanted it!

I asked for a cool toned balayage at the hairdressers, and i love the results.

The process took around 3 hours from start to finish, it took a lot of time and patience (mainly for the hairdresser).

My hair is naturally fairly warm toned, so my hair had to be lifted, coloured and toned to enable a cooler tone throughout my hair.

I kept my natural hair colour at my roots, so the hair dye was blended into my natural colour. Not all hairdressers agree to do it this way as its more difficult to get a good blend between shades, but as my roots were natural my hair lifted well and it wasn't as difficult to blend.

Spring OOTD

A few weeks a go the sun made a slight appearance, so, of course i had to take full advantage.

After being wrapped up in jumpers and jeans for too long, i was a little too excited to wear something other than denim.

New hair!

I recently had my hair dyed for the first time! I asked my hairdresser for a natural balayage/ombre, and heres how it turned out!

Blue and purple ombre nails

Ombre nail design

I first saw this ombre nail design as a tutorial on YouTube. I instantly loved it and was desperate to try it out myself. I was a little apprehensive as I've watched many nail art tutorials before and wanted to try them out my self but realised i did not have half the tools it required! How ever this ombre style nail design is so simple and easy and worked the very first time i tried it.

I already had completed step one of this design by painting all of my nails with a base coat colour (which is recommended to not be too dark). My base coat as you can see is a turquoise blue colour by Barry M (im not sure of the exact name of the colour as it was a friends nail polish). I then took a small piece of sponge and painted on a strip of a different colour wide enough to fit my whole nail. I then placed it around a third to a half of the way up my nail from the bottom, i then wiggled it around and dabbed a few times to ensure there was not an obvious straight line which separated the two colours. I later followed the same steps to add a third colour to the tip of the nail which in my case was a purple shade. I used a different piece of sponge for the different colour. I then finished this design with a clear top coat to protect the nails from chipping to make it last a longer.

All of the nail polished i used were by Barry M, these nail polishes are very affordable at £2.99 for the standard polish and £3.99 for the gelly polish range. The quality of these nail polishes is amazing and i would highly recommend them. However i have not yet tried this nail design with the gelly polish range from Barry M so i cannot review how it went.

Equpiment:

• 2 or more nail polishes of choice
• Clear top coat
• A small section of sponge
• Nail polish remover (to clear any excess nail polish around the nail)

Here is the same technique done with different colours:

Without a top coat

Maybelline: Speeding light and Barry M- Tangerine

With a top coat

Thank you for reading my very first blog post! More to come :-)