Summer Hair Trends: Must Have Products for Natural Looking Summer Highlights

Ahh sweet summer, she's just around the corner. I can feel her warmth tickle my face, and send me into pure bliss.

Summer may be ready for me, but I'm definitely not ready for her! You see for this past fall and winter I dyed my hair very dark in order to accommodate the season. My hair always changes with the seasons.

I'm a dye queen, and I'm always changing with the seasons.

During summer months, I lighten up. The ritual begins now in the late winter months because it is hard getting dark hair light again.


Seeing that I have been doing this for so many years though, I know pretty much all of the tricks. I know how to get my hair light, without it looking shocking. I know how to add blond highlights that look natural, and not like Cruella, and I also know a few pretty spectacular products that will help achieve lighter hair, with natural highlights.

Choosing a dye is the first trick to achieving a perfect base color for your hair. If you choose a crappy dye brand you will end up with calico hair, and it will look like hell.

One of my all time favorite dyes is L'Oreal dyes. I have never had an issue with this brand. There are many types to choose from, but honestly any L'Oreal dye is the way to go. I would not settle for anything less.

If you have dark hair, you will want to lighten your locks up a notch or two. Choose a base color that is a shade or 2 shades lighter than the color you have now.

Next you are going to need a highlighting kit. I have found though that no matter what kit I have used, my strands end up blotched...so I decided to create my own kit.

You will need the lightest blond dye you can find (I use this one). Skip out on those $30.00 lightening kits, a light light blond dye will work just as well as the expensive kits, and you get to save yourself $30.00 and you don't have to worry about that stinky powder crap flying up your nose when you mix it in the included tray; best of all though you won't have blotches! If your hair is dark you're going to want to get the lightest shade of blond that is available.

There are many ways you can add highlights. You can use special aluminum paper to wrap individual chunks of hair that you used the light blond dye on or you can purchase a cheap highlighting salon cap where you enter a grabbing pickinto the holes to pull out smaller thinner strands.

You can also purchase a light blond drip free dye formula to accentuate hair on your top layer of hair.
While adding highlights you want to be very careful on where you place them. If you place them to neatly in rows, you will end up with the ridiculous 90's look where you have stripes of blond hair and dark hair. It looks ridiculous. The best advice I could give would be to add highlights in random places, and try not to over think it.

Keeping up with your highlights is a heck of a lot easier than you may think, especially during summer months. A sun in spray will do the trick without causing reddening or copper tones on grown out roots.

I simply spray in a few squirts of sun in, and just go about my day. My hair slowly lightens up, and I don't have to constantly worry about touching up roots, and believe me, touching up roots is time consuming, and many of the available root kits for sale are way too expensive to try and keep up.

A box of sun in spray will come to around $4.00 or less, and will last all summer long. If you don't spend a lot of time in the sun though, you can also use the spray with a blow dryer. The heat will lighten your hair color in just a few minutes, and will take a lot less time, money and effort than root kits will.

Always remember to keep things simple. If you chunk your highlights too thick, you may as well just dye your whole head blond because it's going to look too overdone. You want natural lights, lights that look like they are really your own natural highlights.