3 Types of Teasing For Luxury Highlights
Soft diffusion, seamless highs and lows and light-catching ribbons of brightness are all hallmarks of luxury dimension. The teasing technique you choose can dramatically impact how brightness blends throughout the hair and where it ultimately lives in the finished result.
Below, Global Artistic Director of BELLAMI Hair, Kenra Professional Artistic Director and owner of REV Salon Eric Vaughn (@realericvaughn) shares three different teasing techniques throughout the face frame to create softness, brightness and seamless transitions between each section.
But first, here’s a look at Eric’s signature luxury dimension work:
Technique #1: The Flick Tease
In the BTC University class, Luxury Color: Key Placement for Crafting Highs and Lows, Eric reserves his lightest teasing pattern for the very first face-frame section where he wants the strongest pop. “For this first section, I’m going to be doing what I call a flick. And that truly is a flick of the wrist.”
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The flick creates minimal diffusion when the section is brushed out, making it ideal for brightening the hairline without creating heavy internal blending. “This is going to give you the softest, lightest, least amount of diffusion when you brush this out.”
To maintain softness, Eric pairs the tease with a textural weave rather than a traditional babylight pattern. “It’s not a babylight. It’s not chunky. It’s just enough to pick up and have a strong pop around her face.”
Technique #2: The Medium Tease
Moving into the second diagonal-back section, Eric increases the amount of teasing to begin connecting the face frame to the rest of the dimension. Unlike aggressive backcombing, Eric uses a controlled approach designed to make detangling easier later.
“I’m going to start in the middle of the section and push up. If I get stuck and I can’t push anymore, I go to the top, give that push, go to the bottom and push that back up,” he shares. “This is called controlled teasing, so when you brush this out, you don’t have hours of painful brushing.”
Eric continues using a textural weave in the second section, prioritizing softness over perfectly uniform placement. “We don’t want anything to be too precise and too perfect because I feel like that tends to make things look too mechanical and for this we’re just looking to create softness.”
Technique #3: The High Tease
“For our third section, we want to make sure to connect this [to the] nape without overdoing it, so we gave our solid good push up with that high tease.” This final tease helps Eric bridge the face frame into the nape while preventing the placement from becoming overly bright or heavy.
“Using our same textural weave, we’re doing a continuation of our overdirecting, placing our lightener where we want to see the bulk of our brightness, feathering down over our ends.” This technique helps maintain diffusion throughout the section.
For lift, Eric reaches for Kenra Simply Blonde Beyond Bond Lightener. He says that the lightener delivers up to nine levels of lift while helping maintain hair integrity thanks to its Dual Bond Complex technology.
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These teasing techniques are just one part of Eric’s complete luxury dimension system. In Luxury Color: Key Placement for Crafting Highs and Lows, Eric breaks down his signature placement strategy for creating seamless highs and lows, custom color palettes and high-end dimension tailored to each client.
Press play to access his full technique:
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