Gigi Hadid’s Highlights Are Not Ombre?What Will This Mean for the Rest of Us?

Now that New York Fashion Week is a wrap, can we pause for a second to focus in on model-of-the-moment Gigi Hadid’s highlights?

This gorgeous close-up of Gigi was snapped at the Tommy Hilfiger show by Glamour‘s backstage photographer Mark Leibowitz, and it perfectly captures why I’m preoccupied with her hair color. See how her highlights extend all the way to the root, going against the ombre/dark-roots trend we’ve been seeing for so long now? I’ve also noticed that her highlights/lowlights look piecey rather than blending together almost imperceptibly (another trend).

I got to wondering: Since Gigi is the It Girl of the minute, is her hair color an indication that we’ll soon see a return to the intentionally chunky highlights we all used to request a decade ago? With so much of fashion nodding to the ’90s lately, it doesn’t seem unthinkable. But when I asked her colorist, Keith Shore of Sally Hershberger Downtown, he noted that sleek runway hairstyles like this one make the model’s highlights look more dramatically piecey than they actually are (and he recoiled at the very term “chunky”). “In terms of color trends, I do think piece-y color makes more of an impact in photos, where muted colors tend to look a bit washed out and flat,” he shares. “However, in Gigi’s case, I just follow the natural color pattern of her hair, which has lighter pieces around her face from the sun. I think the way her hair is styled here gives it a certain dimensional look that is really beautiful—but I think it was styled in this specific way to accentuate the dimension in her hair, not so much colored like that.”

For comparison, here’s a shot of Gigi’s hair styled in beachy waves for the Anna Sui show (photo courtesy of the show’s hair sponsor R+Co).

As for the inspiration and technique behind her color, Keith says it all goes back to her Cali roots. “We are always inspired by the beach, Malibu, and the surfers, because that’s where Gigi is from,” he says. “We do a balayage technique of painting where we sweep color directly onto Gigi’s hair.”

What do you think of the idea of old-school piecey highlights versus the more blended ombre (with scattered bright chunks) we usually see these days? Can any of you ombre lovers ever see taking your highlights to the root again, or would that just be too high-maintenance to return to? Let’s talk hair color down below!