What the foils are telling me lately
I switched up my foiling pattern on fine, color-treated hair about four months ago and I’m still not totally sold on going back, even though two other stylists at my salon think I’m overcomplicating it.
Here’s what happened. I had a client with thin, shoulder-length hair who’d been getting traditional face-framing highlights for three years. Same placement every time. The color was fine, technically correct, did what it was supposed to do.
But it kept looking heavier at the root regrowth point than I wanted, and stretching it out actually slowed that down without changing the foil count or the formula. That’s it. No big revelation, just a placement shift that worked for her specific density.
I don’t do that on everyone. Thick hair doesn’t need it, and honestly on some textures it just reads as patchy instead of soft. But for the fine-hair clients who come in every ten to twelve weeks, it’s become close to a default for me now, and I’d rather explain that than pretend I have one universal foiling philosophy that applies across the board.
Where I land on the warm-versus-cool debate
I think a lot of stylists are too rigid about matching tone to skin undertone, and I’ll probably get pushback for saying that. The undertone matching rule is useful as a starting point. It is not the law.
I’ve put warm copper on someone with what most colorists would call a cool undertone and it looked better on her than anything “correct” would have, because her eye color and the rest of her coloring pulled it together in a way the undertone chart doesn’t account for.
That’s not a popular thing to say in a lot of color education spaces right now. People get attached to the rules because the rules are teachable and a face is not.
I still use undertone as information. I just don’t let it override what I’m actually looking at in front of me.
A correction that didn’t go the way I expected
A client came in last spring wanting to go from a box-dye black back to something close to her natural medium brown. She’d colored it herself twice in six weeks trying to fix the first attempt, and by the time she sat in my chair the second box dye had deposited over the first unevenly, darker through the mid-lengths than at the root.
I’d planned to do a full color removal pass before toning, the way I usually do with stacked box color. But she had a flight the next morning and we only had time for a partial lift.
I did what I could on the mid-lengths and left the ends more saturated than I wanted, then toned everything to sit closer together visually instead of trying to get it even at the molecular level. It wasn’t the result I would have chosen with more time.
She came back six weeks later for the follow-up and the parts I’d been most worried about, the ends, had actually faded into something usable on their own. The root section I was happiest with at the time needed more correction than the part I’d rushed.
I still don’t have a clean explanation for why that happened. Could’ve been the specific brand of box dye in those ends. Could’ve been how she was washing it in between.
I noted it and moved on, because she was happy and there wasn’t a reason to chase it further.
What I’m not getting into here
I’m not going to walk through balayage versus foilyage placement differences, because that’s a whole separate conversation about lightener choice that doesn’t fit what I’m trying to say today. I’m also skipping the gray-blending conversation entirely this time, even though it’s probably my most-asked question lately.
And I’m leaving out at-home maintenance products, because that’s a different list and this isn’t a shopping guide.
On the copper-and-red question I keep getting
Every few weeks someone sits down and says they want “a red but not too red,” and I’ve started just asking what red means to them specifically instead of guessing, because the range between auburn and full copper and a deep burgundy is wide enough that “not too red” tells me almost nothing on its own.
What I’ve noticed, though, is that people who say this usually already have warmth in their natural color and are nervous about maintenance, not about the shade itself. So the conversation usually moves toward fade pattern more than toward the actual color family.
Reds fade fastest of any tone, full stop, and no amount of sulfate-free shampoo changes that in any meaningful way once you’re past the first few washes. I tell people that upfront now.
Some of them still want it anyway, which is fine, that’s their call to make, not mine.
The thing about regrowth lines
Thick, coarse hair with a stark natural-to-color line bothers me more than it probably should. I notice it on myself in mirrors at other people’s houses before I notice almost anything else about my own appearance, which says something I haven’t fully worked through.
It’s not about technique at that point, just a personal thing about how visible the line is on certain textures versus others, and I don’t have a tidy way to wrap that up.
Where the placement question gets messier
I keep going back and forth on whether babylights are actually the right call for clients in their thirties asking for “something low maintenance,” because half the time what they’re picturing is closer to a full balayage and they just don’t have the vocabulary for it yet.
That’s not on them. The terms get used interchangeably online constantly, and most people walking in have seen forty photos under one hashtag that actually represent six different techniques.
So I’ve started doing less talking about technique names and more just pulling up two photos and asking which one looks closer to what they want. It’s faster. It also means I sometimes end up doing a technique I wouldn’t have chosen first based on what they described out loud.
A few weeks back a regular came in wanting “low maintenance” and pointed at a photo that was, structurally, a pretty involved foilyage. Not low maintenance at all, not really, not at her natural level eight base.
I told her that. She still wanted it. We did it.
It’s been nine weeks and she’s already asking about her next appointment because the regrowth is bothering her more than she expected, which is more or less what I told her would happen.
The texture question nobody asks me directly
Curl pattern changes what a color does in a way that straight-hair color theory doesn’t fully prepare you for, and I don’t think enough of the typical color education accounts for it.
On tighter curl patterns, light moves through the strand differently because of how much surface is catching it at different angles along the curl, not just at the cuticle level the way it would on stick-straight hair. I’m not going to pretend I can explain the full mechanism cleanly.
What I know from the chair is that a color that reads as dimensional and soft on straight hair can read as much more solid and flat on a tight curl, and a color that looks almost too subtle in the foil can bloom out into something with way more visible contrast once the curl pattern springs back up.
So I adjust foil placement tighter on curlier textures than I would on straight hair, more foils, smaller sections, to account for how much the visual spacing changes once it’s dry and styled instead of wet and flat in my hands.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to start doing this consistently. For a while I was getting results that looked right wet and wrong dry, and I kept blaming the formula instead of the placement.
A frustration I haven’t worked out
There’s a thing that happens with finishing toners on blonde work where the toner looks perfect under the bowl light at the shampoo bowl and then shifts once the client gets outside, and I still get caught off guard by it more often than I should after this many years.
I know the salon lighting is part of it. Everyone knows that, it’s not a secret. But I’ve had two clients with what should be nearly identical porosity and base color end up with noticeably different outdoor shifts from the same toner formula applied the same week, and I don’t have a satisfying answer for what’s actually different between them.
One stylist I respect a lot told me it’s probably water mineral content varying by which sink we used that day. I don’t fully buy that, but I also don’t have anything better.
What this means in practice is I’ve started doing a quick natural-light check before clients leave whenever I can get them near a window, which adds maybe ninety seconds to checkout.
It’s not foolproof. It’s just better than finding out from a text message two days later that the color “looks different than I remember,” which is its own kind of conversation I’d rather not keep having.
What’s actually selling right now
Copper is having a moment again, more than it has in a few years, and I think it’s less about a single celebrity photo and more about a general shift toward warmer overall palettes that’s been building for a while across a few different trend cycles at once.
I’m seeing fewer requests for the cool ash blondes that dominated requests three or four years ago. Not gone, just fewer.
The clients who do still want ash tend to be the ones who’ve been getting it that way for years and aren’t interested in switching, which makes sense, that’s its own kind of loyalty to a look that works for them.
What surprised me more is how many brunette clients are asking for warmth now after years of requesting cooler, more neutral browns specifically to avoid looking brassy.
I think the brassy-avoidance era taught a whole generation of clients to associate any warmth at all with a mistake, and now some of that’s loosening up, people wanting a brown that actually has some red or gold pulled through it instead of flattening everything toward neutral.
It’s a slower shift than the copper trend on the lighter end, but I’ve noticed it in my own books over the last two or three months specifically.
Where I land on maintenance conversations
I tell people less than I used to about what their color will look like in six weeks, and I think that’s the right call even though it goes against most of the client-education advice I see passed around in stylist circles.
For years I’d walk through the whole fade timeline at checkout. What it’ll look like at three weeks, at six, when to expect the warmth to come back through.
Most of it didn’t land. People remember the appointment, not the conversation, and by the time the color’s actually shifted they’ve forgotten what I said and just feel surprised regardless of how much I warned them.
So now I say less upfront and instead text a quick reminder around the four-week mark for color services where I know the shift is coming. It’s not a system I’d recommend to every stylist.
It works because my book is small enough that I can actually do it by hand without it becoming another piece of admin I resent.
A few of the newer stylists I’ve trained have tried copying that and ended up overwhelmed once their books grew past sixty or seventy regulars. I don’t have a version of this that scales cleanly, and I’m not going to pretend I do.
On glossing between full color appointments
The gloss-only appointment has become a bigger part of my week than it was even two years ago, and I think it’s partly because clients finally understand it’s not the same service as a full color, where for a while a lot of people assumed it was just a cheaper version of the same thing.
It isn’t. A gloss can refresh tone and shine without touching the underlying pigment in any structural way, and for clients stretching their full color out longer for cost reasons, it buys real time.
I’ve got clients now doing a full color twice a year with a gloss at the midpoint instead of full color three times a year, and the end result through the year actually looks more consistent, not less, because the gloss is correcting drift before it gets visually obvious instead of after.
What I didn’t expect is how much this changed the rebooking conversation. Clients ask for the gloss appointment by name now.
A few months ago someone referred a friend specifically for “the in-between appointment,” not knowing the actual service name, and I had to figure out what she meant from context before booking it.
The one thing I still won’t do
I don’t lighten over recently relaxed or chemically straightened hair within the same visit, full stop, even when a client pushes for it and even when another stylist might be comfortable doing it depending on the specific products involved.
I’ve seen the breakage happen. Not hypothetically, in my own chair, early in my career, and it wasn’t subtle.
I won’t walk through the specifics here because it’s not really the point, but it’s the reason I built a hard rule around it instead of evaluating it case by case the way I do with most things.
Almost everything else in this job I treat as a judgment call based on what’s in front of me. This is the one place I don’t, and a couple of stylists I respect think I’m being overly cautious about it given how different products have gotten.
Maybe they’re right. I haven’t tested it enough recently to know if the rule’s outdated or still necessary, and I’m not going to test it on a paying client to find out.
What’s been quietly changing in formulation
Demi-permanent color has gotten noticeably more reliable over the last few years in terms of how evenly it grabs on resistant gray, to the point where I’m reaching for it on clients I would have automatically put in permanent color even three or four years back.
It’s not a universal swap. Stubborn white at the temple still usually needs something stronger to grab fully, and I’m not interested in pretending demi handles every gray situation the way some product reps want stylists to believe right now.
But for clients with fifteen to thirty percent gray who mainly want blending rather than full coverage, the newer demi formulas hold longer than what I remember from earlier in my career, and the regrowth line softens instead of creating that harsh demarcation permanent color tends to leave on finer textures.
I switched two of my long-term gray-blending clients over to demi this year without making a big announcement about it. Neither one asked why.
The color held fine, the appointments got slightly shorter since there’s less processing time involved, and that was kind of the whole story.
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