Pretty up with hair contouring

After face and body contouring, now we have hair contouring that beauty enthusiasts are going gaga about. The process involves high-lighting and low-lighting certain parts of your mane to either enhance or subdue certain features. Similar to how face and body contouring works, one may use the color techniques to create the hair contouring effect. Puja Singh, Senior Technical Educator for RUSK, India helps us with the dos and don'ts.

Highlighting and shading certain parts of the hair can create an illusion of a different face shape, depending on what you want to accentuate. Like with any art form, light shades are for highlighting and darker shades are for creating a shadow effect, similarly adopt this technique in hair contouring with colours. Hair contouring is a pretty intensive act and one has to be clear about the basic rules and guidelines. However, depending upon the face cut and contouring requirement it may take between 1-2 hours.

As makeup contouring has pretty much taken the beauty world by storm, it's natural that hair contouring is next. Face and hair contouring also complement each other, for example, if one doesn't have the time to contour the face, one might follow these simple guidelines for hair contouring:

The examples below, by face shape, explain how to enhance features –
1. Round faces generally have strong bone structure, so light tones are applied around the hairline, from ear to ear. While darker tones are painted underneath the ears and lower ends of the hair. The former brightens and elongates the face, while the latter gives the facial shape more of a point

2. Deeper tones are applied to the root along the part and micro-highlight pieces are threaded from above the ears to the ends of the hair, creating an angular and slimming effect on the face

3. The heart shape is kind of like an inverted triangle, with the face tapering towards the chin. To create a more ovular shape, lighter pieces are woven around the jawline and ears to soften the bottom half of the face

4. Square-shaped faces have wider facial features, so multi-tonal layers of light and dark are applied to the corners of the face and around the jawline and temples, which soften lines and add more depth

Just like face contouring, anyone can get hair contouring done too and it differs from person to person. It is not an expensive treatment, depends upon the no. of highlights one undergoes as per the face type and hair contour requirement.

There is no side effect to it if one always opts for safer, healthier and natural products for use. It is also advisable that every individual reads the ingredients list to be sure of the products being used on themselves.