If done properly, highlights will brighten your face and compliment your best features and overall look. Some people like warmer coppery highlights, while others want highlights as cool as ice. But will that color work for you? The question of what specific color is best for highlighting hair is broken down into several categories.

Choosing Highlights Based on Natural Hair Color

It depends what hair color you are starting out with. For example, if you have dark brown hair and want to add highlights, you would use a color different from a woman who has smoky blonde hair and wants to add highlights.

Let's take a look at some rules of thumb, and the most popular colors to choose for highlighting. Keep in mind lowlights can be just as effective for hiding grays.

Choosing Highlights Based on Skin Tone

When picking out a hair color, one rule of thumb is to work with your skin tone. If you’re warm toned, for example, you might want to go with a golden shade of blonde, and if you skin is cooler, you might want ashier shade of highlights. If you decide on a golden highlight you can always add a few brighter highlights to give your hair high contrast, but the majority of highlights should remain golden. Framing your face with a brighter and lighter “money piece” is a great way to add that extra dimension. But some people choose the tone of their highlight based on trends. You shouldn’t always choose by trend because you will end up looking back on that time wondering what you were thinking!

Take a good look at your undertones: Golden and yellow undertones are pulled by warm skin tones. Pink and blue are pulled by cool skin tones.

It's All in the Eyes

One strategy says to start with the eyes when choosing a highlight color. To the tone of your eye color, match your highlight. As an example, to complement your hair naturally, your highlight shade should be cool toned if you have cool eyes.

Highlighting by Levels

Some haircare experts say that for easily maintained highlights, should be no more than two or three levels lighter than your base color, for a more natural look. They should be in the same tonal family. For a golden, dark blonde base (which is considered warm), warm highlights should be used, such as buttery blonde.

The Ever-Popular Option of Highlighting

Highlights are seemingly always fashionable and in style, as opposed to many specific hair trends.

But what is highlighting? It can be used for many reasons from wanting to do something with your hair that is new and exciting, all the way to covering unwanted gray. To create a lighter overall appearance, specific hair strands are colored. But there are various techniques where baby-lights (uses tinier sections of hair rather than the bigger sections used for highlighting), lowlights (using darker hair color shades, adds depth to hair), and highlights are concerned. Thanks to a myriad of options where hair color is concerned, and today's easy to use highlighting kits, to create your desired effect it, is now easier than ever.

As individual as people are, so are today's methods of highlighting. Highlights are a great option for women who simply don't want the drama or maintenance of single-process hair color. Highlighting is always a very desirable all-over hair color look.

How Is Highlighting Done?

For highlighting, small sections of hair are woven through a cap, then hand-painted with the selected highlight color. To process the hair, it can either be hand separated or wrapped in foil. Each desired hair can be painted from the midsection to the end for more natural looking highlights. There are tons of YouTube tutorials teaching you what to avoid and how to highlight like a pro.

Some people think that only blondes highlight their hair. That is not the case. It's considered a highlight any time sections of your hair are lifted to a shade lighter than the base color. As an example, if golden brown hair strands were added to dark brown hair, those are considered highlights.

By choosing hair healthy products, you can even experiment with colors frequently – causing little to no damage to your hair.

Can You Test Highlights Out On Your Hair Before Committing?

There is a way to play around with highlights to see if a color suits you before committing or doing something you regret. You can use a blonde temporary highlight powder and play around with placement and tones. If you have darker hair and are contemplating some red toned highlights this is a great place to temporarily test it out. If you find the one that you like, then you can feel more comfortable committing to permanent highlights.