Dark Brown Hair with Caramel Highlights

Caramel highlights can make a beautiful complement to dark brown hair. A dark, rich caramel color can work with warmer, deeper skin tones, while lighter or more golden caramel highlights can work nicely for lighter complexions. The style of your highlights can also be varied to provide the specific look you want.

Heavy caramel highlights will create a look lighter than your natural color. The stylist will create many highlights and space them closely together for a heavily highlighted look. The result is similar to an all-over color, but still provides some contrast with your dark hair color.

Full caramel highlights create a pleasing contrast and add depth and dimension to your style. For this look, highlights are applied all over the head, including the underlying hair. The medium thickness of the highlights shown here is modern but not too dramatic, so it could easily work for women in a professional environment.

Ombre-style highlights concentrate the caramel hair color closer to the ends of the hair and use fewer highlights near the face or crown. The look is contemporary and more artistic than traditional styles, so it may work best for women who work in creative fields or relaxed work environments.

A benefit of this style is that is is low maintenance because women can go longer between touch-ups.

Blended caramel highlights will add a touch of brightness and dimension to dark hair. For this style, the colorist will typically create thin highlights that blend in for a more natural look. Since this look is simple and natural-looking, it is appropriate for nearly any work environment.

Adding caramel color closer to your face can brighten up your overall complexion. Thicker highlights, like the ones shown here, provide a bold look, but you could also have your stylist add a few thinner highlights near your face for a softer appearance.

Concentrating the rich color around the face also adds more 'pop' to a shorter or angled cut, making it a good choice for women with bobs, reverse bobs, and asymmetrical cuts.

If you are looking for a bold look, consider asking your stylist to give you chunky highlights with a lighter caramel color. The thick highlights and obvious color contrast results in a modern and eye-catching look. This is a great choice women in creative fields or those looking for a bold, contemporary style of highlights.

Women who need a highly professional look can brighten up their darker hair color with a few subtle highlights. A few well-placed caramel highlights near the face and crown can help add a little dimension to your natural color, or can be added after an all-over color process.

Accent highlights are a fun way to spice up dark hair. This is a good choice for young women or those who want to make a trendy statement. It can also be used as a way to 'test' a certain shade of caramel to see how it works with your hair before committing to a more high-maintenace look such as all-over or face-framing highlights.

Well-placed partial highlights in a rich caramel look beautiful against dark hair. For a partially highlighted look, the colorist will select certain sections on the top layers of hair to color, but hair at the back of the head and the nape of the neck won't be highlighted. This can be a more cost-effective highlighting option, but the difference in coloration will be more obvious when wearing the hair up.

If you are looking for the most creative option for your dark brown hair, consider an artistic style like bayalage, or hand-painted, highlights. The colorist will paint on the caramel highlights to achieve your desired effect, whether it is chunky, concentrated near the ends, or face-framing. This type of highlighting allows more freedom with your look than traditional structured highlighting techniques.

Dark brown hair with caramel highlights can look stunning. Work with a salon professional to select both the right type of highlights and specific shade of caramel for the look that fits you best.