How to Highlight Your Own Hair at Home with Foil

Ok, today I’m going to teach you how to properly highlight your own hair at home. I’ve got a great pair of videos by someone who frequently does her own highlights at home to take you step-by-step through the whole process and some essential tips to go with it that’ll help you out along the way, then I’ve got a video where a couple of girls actually demonstrate (by one of them highlighting the other’s hair) how to do it, explaining as they go.

Also, I put some extra resources at the bottom if you want a different perspective or some extra help. Let’s get started.

First, a few tips

  • The first thing you should do is determine which color highlights look best on you, the easiest way to do this is just use RealBeauty.com’s Instant Makeover tool (here) where you can upload your photo and play around with color, highlights, and all sorts of cool stuff.
  • Wear clothes you don’t mind ruining, because if you get this stuff on them you will likely ruin them.
  • A nifty little tip to prevent the color from dying the skin around your hair line is to take some Vaseline and smear it on your face within about an inch of the hairline, then just wash it off later after everything is done, that way if you get any color on it it’ll just wash right off with the vaseline (they do make a color remover specifically for this, however).
  • Use a good quality conditioner for several weeks prior to coloring.
  • Don’t wash your hair for about a day before you do this.

What to do

Alright, here’s where we get started. This is a bit long, but highlighting your hair yourself is a bit complicated the first time you do it, but it’s really not hard as long as you’ve got the correct information about what to do, which is precisely what I’m about to give you. First, the tutorial where she does it on a dummy, and then I’ll show you a video of a couple of girls actually doing this at home and explaining as they go.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Highlighting at home live demonstration!

I thought they were really cute, plus they did a great job, check this out:

Additional Resources and Further Reading

There is an excellent guide you really ought to check out that was put together by a professional stylist who specializes in coloring and has worked on tons of celebrities over the years (she’s been doing this for nearly 30 years), and was the international hair color training director for the likes of Clairol Inc., L’Oreal, and Vidal Sassoon. I think it is the best overall guide to really doing this properly and making it look AWESOME and oh-so-sexy, it’s by Tracey Hill (who started her own company, Lavender Hill Hair Color) and is called: Excuse Me… Your Roots are Showing!, I highly recommend it.

A couple things I would recommend that you grab are some hair color remover (Amazon has some stuff here called “Color Oops” that’s got excellent reviews), and you can also get a simple hair coloring kit from them here if you don’t have a local beauty shop that sells the necessary equipment.

About.com has got an excellent section here on coloring and highlighting your hair. Mahalo has also got a similar, and very detailed, article on hair coloring here.