2018 Hair Goals!
March 1, 2021
The short version: I put the blonde where you look at yourself, and I put a deeper color where the extensions attach. You still see blonde hair in the mirror. The attachment points have something to hide behind.
Most people think of hair color as a separate service that happens before extensions go in. For me it's part of the install. Where I place color decides how well your extensions disappear, and on fine or low-density hair it can be the difference between a result you love and a result you're self-conscious about.
I'm Shannon Reiley. I own Light Styling in Longmont, Colorado, I've specialized exclusively in hair extensions since 2017, and I was the first stylist in the state certified in Natural Beaded Rows. Before extensions I spent six years as a chemical specialist doing color, perms and smoothing, which is where this particular habit comes from.
This is the part clients find counterintuitive, because blonde is what most of them want.
Hair hides things by contrast. Your eye needs something to stop on. When your hair is light and your scalp is light, there's very little contrast anywhere, so anything sitting against your scalp reads clearly. Darker hair over a scalp creates a visual floor, and small objects against that floor can disappear a bit easier into it.
Add low density and it compounds. If you can see scalp through your hair in ordinary light, you can see what's attached to it. Published trichoscopy work puts normal adult scalp density in the range of roughly 120 to 230 hairs per square centimetre depending on region and population (Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology, 2022), and a typical hair fibre is 50 to 100 micrometres across (Materials Science and Engineering C, 2017). When you're at the low end of both, you simply don't have much material to work with. Color is one of the few levers left.
Three places, and they're not arbitrary.
The sides. What you see in a mirror and what other people see in conversation.
The frame of your face. The brightness that reads as "she's blonde" is nearly all happening within a few inches of your face.
The mohawk section. That's the strip running front to back over the top of your head. It's what you see when you look down, what shows in a photo taken from above, and what shows when your hair is parted.
Get those three right and you are, for all practical purposes, blonde. Nobody is auditing the back of your occipital bone.
Everywhere the attachment points live. For my last client that meant a darker brown deposited around the occipital bone and through other areas of her scalp where I knew bonds were going. You can read what I did for her, and why her beaded rows had been showing, in a separate post.
The logic is simple. A bond against dark roots is a dark thing against a dark background. A bond against pale blonde roots is a shape with an outline. Same bond, same install, completely different visibility.
I don't do this to every client. It's for the ones whose density means the method alone won't hide itself, and it's a conversation before it's a color formula. You're going to have deeper roots in places, and you should decide that with your eyes open.
I say this out loud before I mix anything, because it's the one thing that rattles people.
When you get up out of the chair after the color service and before the extensions go in, your own hair will look darker than you expected. That's not a mistake and it isn't the finished result. The brightness is coming from the extension hair, which gets placed on top of and through what I just colored.
Lowlights are about dimension. You weave darker pieces through light hair so the overall color has depth and doesn't read flat. It's an aesthetic choice, spread fairly evenly.
This is about placement. The darker color goes in specific zones chosen because of where hardware is going, not because of how the color will look as a pattern. Some of it is in places that would be strange choices for lowlights, and that's the point.
Both can be true in one head of hair. But if you ask your stylist for lowlights expecting it to hide your extensions, you'll likely be disappointed, because nobody weaving lowlights is thinking about your bond map.
If you want the general picture of what I do with color rather than the extension-specific version, that's on my hair coloring services page.
Who it isn't for: if you've got good density and dark hair already, you don't need any of this. The method will hide itself.
I'll add one Colorado-specific note, because it comes up in my chair constantly. Our light is bright and our air is dry, and both work against you here. Hair that looks fine indoors reads differently in full Front Range sun, and dry hair sits looser and separates more than hair in a humid climate does. If you've moved here from somewhere humid and feel like your extensions suddenly show more than they used to, you aren't imagining it.
In the zones where I place it, yes, somewhat. In the places you actually look at yourself, no. Most clients don't register it after the first week, and the trade is that they stop scanning the back of their head in every mirror they pass.
Usually fewer, not more. Once the placement is established, future appointments are mostly covering new regrowth rather than redoing the whole map. That is the plan I set up with clients so they stop re-lightening the same hair every single visit.
It helps most with methods that attach at the scalp, so beaded rows, K-tips and CombLine all benefit. It makes the biggest difference where density is lowest.
Not that I've seen. Most color services are planned as color, and most extension installs are planned as installs. I plan them together because I do both in the same chair, and because on fine hair you need every advantage available.
Then we work with what's left: method choice, bond size, and placement set further back. I'd rather tell you honestly that your result will be harder to hide than put color in your hair you didn't agree to.
Start with my application and a few photos, and we'll talk it through on a free 15-minute call. Get started here.
