My instructor swore by the 45 degree rule, ruined 2 highlight jobs in a row

Back at Aveda in Austin, my educator kept saying to always hold foils at 45 degrees for maximum lift. I did that exactly on two clients last month and both came out patchy, with hot spots near the roots. Turns out my chair angles and the Aveda bleach they taught with dont mix like that for finer hair. Has anyone else had a textbook rule that just doesnt hold up in real salon work?

2 comments

2 Comments

marywilson28d ago

Wait, what level was their hair? Because I've seen that 45 degree rule work great on coarse hair but it's a disaster on anything below a level 6. Did you check the porosity before you started? That's the real game changer. Fine hair just lets that bleach run right down the strand and settle at the root no matter what angle you use. I'm wondering if your educator ever actually demonstrated it on a live model with finer hair or just on mannequin heads.

wood.eric28d ago

...and honestly @marywilson, that porosity check is where I messed up the first time I tried the 45 degree thing. My girl had a level 5 with some old color on the mids, and I just assumed the angle would save me. It didn't. The bleach creeped up to the root anyway because her ends were so porous they sucked everything down. What finally worked was doing the root last, no matter what angle I held the brush, and I also started sectioning thinner than I thought I needed to. Like half inch sections instead of the usual inch. That gave me way more control over where the product actually sat. The educator in my class only ever did it on a thick, coarse mannequin head too, so we never saw how it behaves on fine hair. Biggest lesson for me was to just adapt the angle based on how the hair takes the product, not the other way around.