It’s human nature to experiment, and there’s no source with which to experiment quite like one’s appearance. People will cut their hair all different ways, wear different makeup, and try different clothing styles; they’ll attempt to look taller, shorter, older, younger, thinner, fatter, or stranger. Humans also love to change their hair with all manner of hair dye colors and hairstyles, like proud peacocks and other colorful birds.
That said, you may have noticed a lot of different hair coloring trends lately. You may even be considering a couple of them to experiment with on yourself. Here are some recent hair color trends:
#1: Opal Hair
You’ve seen the videos and the pictures. A blonde goes into a salon and comes out with this beautiful mane of cascading colors that shine with an iridescent sheen. It’s known as “opal hair,” and it’s wildly popular right now. Opal hair is supposed to resemble all of the reflected colors in a fiery opal stone. When it is done right in a professional salon, it most definitely looks like an opal, or at least, a rainbow unicorn’s mane, and what girl doesn’t want that?
#2: Ombré Single-Color or Triple-Color
For ombré hair, people used to have blonde hair dye to cover their original and darker hair color and then just let it grow out so that you could see the roots. Now, ombré color has taken on a whole new form. For the single-color effect, start with light-colored hair. If you have to bleach your natural color, wait between bleaching and coloring.
Then your colorist will take any color you want, from pink to flaming red, and start with it about mid-way down the length of your hair. Depending on what you want, it can begin pale and grow into a deeper, more vibrant tone, or start with the vibrant tone at the top of your head and fade into a pale, almost-not-there color at the tips of your hair.
That’s just for a single-color ombre. You can also use two colors that overlap and bleed into each other, like hot pink and lilac, or you can do a triple-color. With triple color, the lightest color fades into the next lightest color and then the darkest color. For example, you might want hot pink fading into electric blue fading into royal purple.
#3: Gray Before Your Time
This is one crazy trend that is taking off with much younger people. They are intentionally coloring their hair gray or various tones of silver. It is odd to see someone so young with such silver hair, but it works for some people. If your hair is already naturally graying and you are older, it could work too, except that the desired visual effect is not quite as surprising or delightful as expected.
On the flip side, graying or silvering your hair leads the way to coloring with much more vibrant and loud colors. The impact of hot pink and purple against gray/silver is quite stunning. If you don’t want to go completely silver or gray intentionally, add some other vibrant colors to the mix.
#4: Roots!
There was once a time when leaving your darker roots showing was an utter embarrassment. Not anymore–now showing darker roots is on point with the color trends. Some celebrities are intentionally painting light roots darker, or bleaching chunks of hair lighter and leaving dark roots uncolored. If you still feel awkward about this trend, it’s understandable, since it looks like your colorist only did half the job. However, it is insanely popular right now.
#5: High-Contrast Chunking
With this trend, you aren’t even chunking your entire head. Instead, you take one chunk upfront or to the side of your face and make that either extremely light or extremely dark. Then you either leave the rest of your hair its natural color, or you make that extremely light or dark in sharp contrast to the one or two chunks you made light or dark. It can be a very dramatic look as well as one that is elegant and sophisticated with the right haircut.
