Hi, beautiful. Today, we're doing some balayage. I love balayage because it's just the most simple way to elevate a style, even if the hair is brown, adding a little bit of dimension with some balayage is beautiful, and then also making something really, really blonde with balayage is beautiful, and everything in between is also beautiful.  This is a beginner's way of doing balayage. I'm not gonna do any real complicated patterns or techniques. You don't need to be super exact and precise with every little piece of painting you put on ahead to make it look really nice and be super impactful. So if you wanna learn how to do easy as balayage, then follow me. Let's do it. So what you'll need today is just a few simple things. Obviously, a bold, some developer. I'm going to be using this 30 volume. I pretty much always use 30 volume. I like to cut down on my time rather than a lower developer or raise it. So if you're using 20 and I'm gonna leave it on the head for an hour, I'd rather use 30 and leave it on the head for, say, 30 minutes or so. Because I'm so fast with my painting and pretty much everything I do with hair, I like to use 30 volume most of the time. You can also put some Olaplex or any kind of bond building treatment inside of your mixture. You're also gonna need powdered developer. This is how I like to store mine. It's kind of ugly, but it's okay. This is just a gaitang identity bag of powdered bleach. And obviously, we're gonna need a brush. I'm gonna use this frame art brush. This is great though. It has really flexible bristles and has very fine bristles on the top. I love that for painting. If it's too hard and rigid, it gets a little difficult. You can't really get in there and make nice swipes. We're gonna use some gloves and I have four clips here. And these are great because they hold up a lot of hair at once. Lastly, you're gonna definitely need a tail comb. I love my YS Park combs. You guys are looking for really nice combs that are a little bit pricey, but really work well. So we're gonna use this to section there. I switched bowls. I was feeling a clear moment today. I'm going to mix this into a thick, creamy formula. The more thick it is, the less it glides in the hair, but you also don't want it to be runny and thin because that will create bleeding and it'll be a mess for you. You know, some people use scales for this. Some people eyeball it. I'm one of those people that eyeball it. A good mixing ratio would be two parts powder to one part developer and that should give you a great consistency. So this is exactly how I like my liner. All right, now that we got that mixed up, let me grab my client.  Hi, Miss Manny Quinn. What are you looking to do with your hair today? Okay, that's ugly. We're not doing that. So she's gonna be getting this sort of look. Very cute. I picked it out for her. However, you know, you wanna make sure your client knows it may take more than one session to get their desired result depending on what they're looking for. We are going for this beautiful blended look with some impactful pieces towards the bottom and around her face. Now she's gonna part in the middle. She told me.  And there we have it, guys. The most simple and most basic parting you can do. So we're gonna be doing diagonal backs here. You see that right there? That's what you want. This is going to make it so that the highlights are very blended. When you do diagonals, you're getting blending. When all this hair is straight down over this hair, you're just gonna get pops of highlights within every section. So say if you take this and you kind of section it out, the highlights are gonna be all over the place instead of like a harsh line going across. Now we're gonna be working on more horizontal as we get to the front.  Very harsh right here and a little bit lighter down through the back, okay? And I feel like Bollywood right now is about being like a little natural looking. However, we still want that impactful brightness and that kind of almost streaky look that people are going for now. So one of the most important things when doing Bollyage is that your attention is good. So you wanna make sure there's no tangles in the hair because you would hate to highlight a tangle into the hair. So we're gonna take this section and we're gonna take it right out from the head at 90 degrees. If the section was horizontal, it'd be this way. If it's diagonal, it's going the same diagonal way the part is. And I like to start kind of at the middle and work my way up, okay? We're not pushing down on the hair. That will give you weird blotchiness going on. We don't want that. And I like to bring up a couple of bright highlights going on and then I like to really blend the center. If you need to wipe some excess of the bleach onto the back of your hand, you can totally do that as well. Now you can blend up and I like to go up and down and not just go downwards but try and focus on the downwards motion as much as possible. Sometimes you can create a little bit of like frizz at the scalp if you start going up and down like very vigorously. But yeah, that is what it should look like. And you know what, guys? Something I've learned while doing a lot of balayage, you don't need to make it that perfect, okay? It's not worth it. Most of the time you end up putting some kind of darker toner on the hair. So you can also take your brush horizontally and blend it upwards like that. Now this is looking pretty good to me. I just want to make a couple adjustments before I move on. At the ends, I'm going to be doing full saturation because we want really bright and impactful highlighting at the end faded into more of a soft highlight at the top. I'm literally just taking it in my hand and adding a ton of lightener to it, literally squeezing the hair to make sure it's all in there. And you can see on the bottom, that is how it should look. You can also flip it upside down and blend it a little bit more. I like to look underneath and kind of just like do a little blend. Your last stroke, you're going to want to make sure there's a nice amount of lightener on those ends before you let it go. So that's our first section down. It was super simple. If it's kind of leaning like this off to one side, you did it right. Your tension was good, so congrats. And if you didn't, try harder next time, okay? And we're going to move to the other side. We're going to do the same exact thing on the other side. As you can see, these are very large sections and that is going to be fine because it is the underneath of her hair.  If that your client or whoever you're doing this on likes to pull their hair up into a ponytail a lot, I would recommend going underneath here and putting a lot of highlights underneath. You can lift this up and fully paint underneath as well. But my girl doesn't wear her hair in a ponytail. She doesn't care. She likes the underneath kind of dark. And so do I. Second section is all finished. So that is what it's looking like. You know, it's looking a little crazy, but I promise it won't when I'm done. Now you can use Saran Wrap to cover your sections, but you don't need to. Sometimes I just like to lay the hair on top. It's a little risky since this is not Bolliage play lightener. You know, you can buy lightener that does have a protective surrounding on it when it dries. However, you know, when I do this, I just like to lay the hair very gently on top sometimes and do that moment and not worry about it bleeding. Cause it really shouldn't if you've done it correctly. And obviously just make sure the person doesn't like sit back on it or do anything crazy, but I just don't even use plastic anymore. It's not worth it. We're going to leave a little bit of hair down in between each section. That is how much I'm leaving down. I do want this to be, you know, a good amount of highlights on her. So we're going to take the next section and this is going to be a bit thinner than the last just because I want this one to be a little bit lighter. So again, with the tension, just making sure you're pulling out from the head and keeping that tension there the entire time. Now for this one, you see, I just kind of went on the sides and I'm trying to make it very bright and a little more blended in the center. And I'm going all the way up to her root and then really adding a lot on those ends, literally like frosting you guys. You want so much lightener so that it really lightens well. You can also use foils that way if the person's hair is really dark to start and you want a very light result, you can get it all in one day. Using foils will make the lightener develop faster. It'll make it develop lighter. So that's two sections done on this side. As you can see, they're laying on top of each other. This hair is to the side and it's all fine. You know, nothing's touching. I'm not using clay lightener and it'll all be beautiful. Okay, let's do the same thing on this side. So we're moving up the back. We're just doing the same thing over and over again until we reach the top. And as I do this, I just want to share with you guys a little secret. So at first when I did Balayage, I thought it was one of the most torturous things I could ever think about doing. It took so long for me to do it. And a lot of this is because I was trained at a very technical salon. They have us do very intricate techniques and would make sure our work is absolutely perfect when we're finished. What I realized when I got on the floor there and started doing clients my own and my own ways is that I am much more of a artistic person where I like to look at the head and decide how I want to do my Balayage. So I don't usually like to go with certain patterns for everybody. I typically look at the head and figure out where the calyx are, how the person's hair is growing and kind of like how they wear it on a day to day and what their goals are and go based off of that. Once you kind of learn the basics, you can really switch it up and do all sorts of really cool things so that each person has a perfectly tailored Balayage look based on their needs and their hair. So typically here I will just go like this with the hair and push it back up to the scalp and see where the hair naturally parts. Now usually people have some interesting calyx going back here and sometimes it'll be parted like that naturally. So I'll put a highlight going this way and then one going this way. That way when their hair naturally parts into that calyx formation, it's gonna have highlights on both sides. Now Miss Miniquin's hair lays just down flat. So I'm gonna be doing just some horizontal sections going like that. That way she gets really impactful highlights right on the top of her hair and it looks really bright and beautiful. I'm gonna skip one section before I start just because we just did a section below that. Make sure it's not laying on the other hair and then I'm gonna just cut across and do these two sections. So that's looking really good. I'm just gonna add a full saturation at the bottom and this piece will be good to go. And for this next section, I am not gonna be skipping any hair. I'm just gonna be doing the next section right over the previous. So that is the back all done. It was so easy. It was like 15 minutes of work. Now I'm gonna move on to the front section. I'm gonna do one off camera and then show you guys how I did it on the other side. All right, so I just completed this next side and I know some of you guys are gonna be like, bruh, that looks really messy. Bruh, it's not. It's gonna be super cute. And it also looks like I'm skipping no hair in between but I'll show you guys what I did right now. What we're gonna do is just section out this top part of her hair at her recession and we're just gonna section out a bit of hair around her hairline. Now this part is the part where you're going to paint last. This would be kind of their baby hairs and we don't want that to break off. And then we're sectioning out the rest down here. We're gonna paint this last all in two sections and we're gonna really make it super impactful and you'll see that.  They tend to not hold up the hair very well. So just a few braids and that's it. It's gone out of the way. Now our first section is a diagonal back. Make sure you are directing the hair the way it is parted and really gripping it nicely. Add a few more stronger pieces on the sides. So now we are nearing the top of my girl's head here and we're gonna just take out this triangle to make it go horizontal now because horizontal highlights gives you more definition. On the top we want super impactful bright highlights. This is where every client looks. An important thing to note is if you like put a clump of color on the hair like that in one spot, you don't want that. You want a really smooth out finish with the bleach on the hair. That way you don't get any light spots and dark spots.  It's just gonna be nice because we're going from a darker color to a lighter color. We want that gradient up here. But if you lay a lot of lightener in one spot on the ends it will be lighter and it will look gross. So don't do that. Okay, we are on the final piece on the top of her head and we have to do the front front pieces. But this one, since we have this sectioned out at the front and I'm gonna go really high in the front, I don't want to add a highlight here because that'll be one big chunk of highlight. I'm gonna add a really bright highlight down the center like that and then I am going to blend the rest of it into that center highlight. And our last two pieces are the most important of all. This is where everybody looks first, okay?  So we're gonna undo that braid and section out this underneath. We're gonna lift this out 90 degrees from her head and we are gonna paint this entire section right up to the root, all right? We don't have to do a ton of blending just getting it right up there. It's also good to do this last because this is so fragile, this hair up here and it usually develops the fastest and moving on to the last and final and most important piece of all.  Don't break your back. Okay, we're gonna go right up here and do a very bright highlight. That way she gets those beautiful money pieces, honey.  We're done, we're done, we're done, balayage. All right, so we just finished the sides. This is what it looks like. It looks fabulous. It's developing really nicely. The back is nearly ready to be rinsed out. So what I like to do is rinse by section. So the back we did first, we're gonna rinse that first and then this side and then this side. So you can time it however you want. 35 to 45 minutes is enough time for your balayage to process. It's all based on the hair type, the hair texture, everything going on with that person's hair. So just check it and make your best judgment on when it is done being processed and then do the same amount of time on each side and rinse them out per section. I'm gonna go do that, rinse everything out, put a little toner on here and show you guys the finished results. All right, you guys, so this is the finished look. Oh my God, she looks incredible. I wish this was my hair, honestly, like what? When you pull the hair back, she gets this beautiful lightness going on. I mean, it's just beautiful. It's just so natural looking. I am obsessed. Balayage just like does something to me when it's done nicely. I just love this look. So I toned with a very easy, simple formula, which was 8GN, I used Shades EQ. As you can see, her hair looks completely different. I hope you guys can take some of those techniques and use them on yourself or on your clients to get beautiful, gorgeous, fabulous balayage. If you guys aren't already subscribed, make sure you do write down below and also while you're there, why don't you just click the bell icon to be notified every time I post a new video and the like button. Make sure you guys text me at this number right here. Yes, this is really my number. Yes, it really does go to my phone and yes, I really do see all of your messages. So text me now. You'll also be notified every time I post a new video if you text that number. Make sure you guys follow me everywhere else here on my social media handles all around me.  So fun, so cute, so fresh. If you guys wanna check out my haircare line and my color line, you can. So now at xmondohair.com, it is linked below. You can get awesome, fabulous, amazing hair color. You can also check out our Instagrams at xmondocolor and xmondohair to see what we have going on at all times. If you guys wanna shop in merch, you can do so. Here's a line of merch. How fabulous is it? It's Live Your Extra Life merch. If you want it, you can shop the link down below. Also at xmondohair.com. Today's Instagram shoutout goes to Jennifer. She says, for a while now, I've been trying to figure out something different to do with my hair. It's been dark, brown, and boring my whole life. I understand you have a very busy life and you'll probably never see this, but I love your guidance. Oh girl, I'm seeing it. If you're trying to do something different, honestly, I would just do some polyage. Like literally exactly what we did today on your hair would look so freaking pretty. Just lighter pieces going throughout that beautiful natural color you have would look amazing. If you end up doing it, I would love to see a photo. That's all for today guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to Live Your Extra Life and I'll see you next time. Bye guys.