That feeling you get when walking out of the salon, head full of fresh highlights? Just insert all of the feel-good emojis here. But having to clock three, four, sometimes five or six hours or more of chair time just to get there? Well, that's far from ideal. Which is why we’re psyched to hear about anything that can potentially make lightening hair easier.
Enter: The Blonde Wand from pro brand Pravana.
At first, it may seem a bit too good to be true — a handheld device for your stylist that helps shorten a labor intensive, foils-upon-foils process into an express service that can be done on a lunch break. Seriously, that's the claim. What's more, the brand says it utilizes a specially formulated hair lightener loaded with coconut oil, which can minimize damage, compared to traditional lifting formulations.
Here’s how it works: The colorist paints creme lightener on sections of the hair and wraps each with foils, then passes The Blonde Wand over each foil a few times (depending on how light you plan to go) to speed up the removal of pigment using heat.
Flat-ironing hair while in foils may seem dicey, but here’s the thing: The wand’s plates don’t actually touch the foils — they simply hover at about an inch above and below a foil, using ventilated blades on either side to dispense just enough heat to rapid-lighten without damaging the hair to the extent of traditional lightening. “Flat irons go up to 440 degrees,” says Pravana director of marketing Irene Seferian. “This emits nowhere near that level of heat.” And because the process uses fast passes of calibrated heat applied to each, overall lifting time is significantly reduced. Basically, it applies more concentrated heat to each section, as opposed to your entire head going under a dryer.
But our favorite benefit is the immense amount of time saved in the salon. In a company test, a full beach-blonde balayage color session with The Blonde Wand minimized a typical two-and-a-half hour appointment to just 60 minutes. We can’t imagine how much time it will save for those undergoing vivid dye jobs, which require the hair be stripped of color before made bright.
The wand itself is pretty automated — unlike a flat iron, contains no heat setting selection. And stylists don’t have to tap through menus to determine how light they want to make the hair (the company says it can lighten up to seven levels). Celeb stylists, like 901 Salon’s Nikki Lee — who blondes actresses like Emma Roberts and Abigail Breslin — is already on board, calling it “The biggest thing in blonding.”
All this automation makes the process seem like a no-brainer. But before you get any DIY ideas, know that The Blonde Wand is available to hair pros only for a very good reason. Highlight placement is very much an art form and even with this cool tool, stylists still need to open and check foils to ensure the right amount of lift is achieved.
The device is being released to salon professionals October 1, which means we should be able start shaving hours off of our blonding services three to four weeks later. By November, Seferian estimates that thousands of salons will have wands in play.
We'll keep you posted as we learn more, but it appears that a game-changer in hair color is about to hit the market.
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