Word on the Street Is "Palm Painting" Is the New Balayage

There’s no questioning the fact that when it comes to looking effortlessly natural, French girls do it best. Their fresh, perfectly imperfect beauty look is coveted by women the world over, but anyone who’s tried ‘au naturel’ chic will also know that it’s anything but effortless to emulate. A LOT of hard work goes into looking like you’ve genuinely just woken up like that (unless you were born French), and this is especially true when it comes to hair.

Tousled waves with grown-out, sun-kissed highlights à la Vanessa Paradis and Léa Seydoux may look like the result of last summer’s vacation to Saint-Tropez, but it’s actually artful highlighting. (Please, no one’s roots naturally look that good.) Thus our ears perked up when we heard about a new technique that’s rapidly gathering momentum in Europe and has taken natural highlighting to the next level. Enter Palm Painting, balayage’s brush-free counterpart. Pioneer of the trend Marcos Verissimo, senior colorist at Neville Hair and Beauty in London, tells us all you need to know. Keep scrolling to find out about the palm painting hair-color technique!

“Palming is a technique that involves spreading hair color with your hands and only hands (no tools like brushes or combs),” explains Verissimo. It goes one step further than balayage, as it doesn’t follow any pattern or structure, which helps avoid harsh lines and stripes you often get with highlighting tools. Instead, the color is massaged in freehand to large sections of hair and not too close to the root either. This allows virgin (otherwise known as undyed) hair, particularly around the hairline, to show through; meanwhile, the subtle difference in thickness of the highlights supposedly gives a much gentler and more fluid look.

“Palming enables me to achieve great dimension and break all the rules,” explains Verissimo. Unlike foils when the hair is folded up in isolation, palming allows highlighted strands to sit on hair that hasn’t been colored. The slight payoff mimics a natural, sun-kissed look (because you never come back from vacation with perfect bleached stripes).

It’s healthier for hair not only because the low upkeep means you don’t have to get it dyed as often, but also because of the way color takes to hair. “Foil-free hand technique means the hair isn’t overly processed, and the color lifts much slower,” explains Verissimo. Foils accelerate the dyeing process (which is why you get a much lighter color), but that weakens hair follicles as the dye is too quickly absorbed.

So far, we’ve yet to see any examples of palm painting on curly, textured, or kinky-curly strands, and we’re very curious to see if the same technique can transfer to hair that isn’t wavy or straight.