Did you know that a trip to your hair colorist can help make your face slimmer? With the right hair color, you can make your face look thinner and chiseled instantly.
Lucky for you, we’ve rounded up all of the best face-slimming hair color trends in this list, so let’s get started!
The 21 ideas below all use the same trick: darker depth at the sides of the face, brightness where you want the eye to go. The full guide to why that works sits after the gallery.
Best Face Slimming Hair Color Trends
Are you ready to have a slimmer and sexier face? Here are the face-slimming hair color trends that can help you achieve one:
1. Dark Blonde
Fancy going blonde but also badly want to slim down your round face? Dark blonde is your best bet. It works because it keeps depth around the face while still reading blonde, and depth is what visually narrows.
It’s the darkest shade of blonde but it’s still a shade lighter than the classic brown color. That’s not all. How easy it is to maintain depends on your natural base, since the closer you start to it, the gentler the upkeep, and it’s versatile enough to work well on all skin tones.
2. White Blonde
If you like a lighter blonde shade, you can always go for white blonde. But since it won’t conceal your cheeks the way dark blonde does, the next best thing you can do is to choose your haircut wisely. An all-over bright shade on its own does not slim: the effect comes from dimension, with darker and lighter zones steering the eye toward some features and away from others.
To make your face look less wide, make sure to go for one that has face-framing layers like this one.
3. Orange Hair with a Blonde Money Piece
Slimming down your face is all about face framing and money-piece highlights are the way to go if you wish to achieve this.
Moneypiece is a face-framing highlight placed in the front hairline. It’s designed to be the focal point of the hairstyle and draw attention from the face to the hair. Placed well, it can also spotlight the features you want noticed, such as the eyes, cheekbones, or jawline: lighter pieces around the face open and brighten, while darker tones conceal and slim.
4. Jet Black
And if you want darker hues, nothing can get darker than jet black. With its dark shade, this simple yet stunning hue can hide your cheeks and make your face look less wide than usual.
That said, this hair color is especially striking on women with a pale skin tone, and it works just as beautifully on deeper skin tones, where jet black is often the natural shade.
5. Brown and Blonde Hair with Full Bangs
If you wish to play with lowlights and highlights, this is one look you can copy!
Go for a light brown base and add strategically placed blonde highlights to make your hair stand out and become the apple of everyone’s eye. Concentrate them around the face and through the ends: that placement reads as length and draws the eye downward.
6. Chestnut Brown
Your hair can be dark but it doesn’t mean it has to be dull too! If you’re looking for a dark brown shade that won’t look boring, chestnut is highly recommended. This warm earthy shade is so rich in pigment that it always looks healthy and shiny, even on straight hair.
7. Ash Brown Curls
Now, here’s a gorgeous shade that will let you harness the slimming power of brown colors while enjoying the stylish, smoky, and cool undertones of the gray color. It flatters most people, though if your skin tone runs warm, choose carefully: heavy ash sitting against warm skin can leave the complexion looking dull.
8. Dark Pink Ombre
For those who want to play with colors, ombre is the way to go!
With this dark pink ombre, you can keep the top part of your hair darker (to enjoy that slimming effect) and the bottom part colorful. The pink bottom adds a touch of style to your overall look and creates an illusion of length at the same time; for the slimming part to work, keep the darker shade running past your jawline, since it is the lighter bottom section that does the lengthening.
9. Coffee Brown
Coffee brown is a shade that’s somewhere between medium and dark brown. It would work well as highlights on darker brown shades like espresso. On the other hand, it’s also an amazing all-over hair color since it grows out beautifully on dark hair colors. With a single all-over brown like this, though, it is really the cut doing the slimming; the color’s job is depth and shine.
10. Copper Red
To dive into the wonderful world of red shades, go for copper which is a mix of brown, red, and orange shades and gives off that fiery look. That said, this rich and sophisticated hue is especially flattering on women with fair skin. Copper pulls attention to the hair itself rather than visually slimming the face, so pair it with face-framing shape if slimming is the goal.
11. Dark Brown
This darkest shade of brown sometimes looks black from afar so you’re sure that it’s vivid enough to make your face look slimmer.
If you find dark brown hair to be a bit boring, you can always choose to add babylights. Make it look more natural by going for highlights that are only one to two shades lighter than the base.
12. Dark Red
Good news, redheads! Your hair color is one of the best face-slimming hair colors out there. Rich reds read as depth around the face, and depth is what visually narrows; keep a few brighter ribbons where you want the eye to land.
For those who are not naturally redheads, this darker shade of red is easiest to achieve if your current hair color is already on the darker side of the spectrum, since no lightening is needed first. Starting lighter, the color has to be built instead: either deposit onto the lighter base, or lift a darker base to the orange stage first and color over that.
13. Dirty Blonde
While the blonde shade is not exactly the best hair color for slimming facial features, the dirty blonde shade is a good exception. That’s because this color is a mixture of light and dark blonde shades, which reads as depth so long as some warmth stays in the mix; stripped of all warmth, ash-heavy blends fall flat rather than dimensional.
14. Dark Curls with Golden Highlights
The dark base + highlights is a face-slimming combo that never fails. To help elongate your face, we recommend asking your colorist to leave your roots dark.
15. Pink Hair with Purple Roots
While pink is not the first hair color that would come to mind when we think of face-slimming hair colors, there’s a great workaround that you can try. That is to play with different pink shades.
The blend of light and dark pink shades will make your hair look more interesting and capture everyone’s eyes.
16. Golden Balayage on Long Waves
Balayage is a hair-coloring technique wherein the highlights are painted freehand. The highlights often start midshaft and the lightness gets wider at the ends of the hair.
17. Violet Bob with Magenta Accents
For a dark yet vibrant hue, purple is the way to go. Its slimming power is the depth: worn dark, with brighter purple ribbons for dimension, it frames the face the way brunette shades do. If you find all-over purple hair a bit boring, you can incorporate other shades of purple to make your look more interesting.
18. Light Brown Hair with Fine Blonde Highlights
Ahhh, here’s the most common face-slimming hair color + highlight combo. The classic brown is a great base due to its darkness but you can spice it up by adding highlights in different blonde and brown colors to frame a wide face perfectly. Build the dimension through the back of the head and keep the lightest pieces around the face to open and brighten it; from there, the shaping of the cut is what actually slims.
19. Blonde and Lilac
If you wish to go for pastel colors, no one will stop you from doing so. However, you may want to add a few blonde streaks to add dimension to your hair and make it more suitable for round faces. Keep those lighter pieces weighted toward the bottom half of the hair; lightness sitting low is what creates the lengthening effect.
20. Dark Brown-to-Blonde Ombre
For those who are getting tired of the classic brown + blonde highlights, the dark brown ombre is a nice variation. The lighter shade begins just below the ears, making your face look longer than it really is.
21. Dark Blue
Who says you can’t enjoy blue hair with a round face? The key is to find a darker shade of blue, just like this gorgeous sapphire shade. It looks sophisticated and stylish but most of all, it’s dark enough to make your face look slimmer.
Which Hair Colors Will Make Your Face Look Slimmer?
The right color placement can do quietly what contouring makeup does: create the impression of a slimmer, more lifted face. Here is what to ask for:
Dark Hair Color
Can color really slim a face? Senior stylist Emma Baxendale says yes, and explains the physics:
It is about dark and light when it comes to sculpting the face. Darker colors, the same as with clothing, slim through shadow and contrast. That is why a money piece or face-framing highlights open up and brighten the face, while a dark brunette or sleek black closes it in and slims.
Placement decides everything: light opens an area up, shadow recedes it, and you steer the eye toward cheekbones or jawline. Subtle and natural or bold and dramatic is purely the client's style.
The darker and richer your hair color is, the more noticeable it is. As a result, the focus of the eyes will be on your dark hair than the roundness of your face.
Shading
If you don’t like the idea of going for a single unified color or you want a light hair base, the next option that you have is shading, using darker colors to create a slimming effect. The trick is placement: build the dimension through the back and keep the lightness where you want the focus, and the contrast does the slimming for you.
Highlights and Lowlights
You can also opt to go for highlights which will add depth and dimension to your hair, making it more noticeable than the shape of your face.
Another trick is to apply highlights on the lower portion of your hair (from the ears downwards) which helps elongate the face and make it look slimmer.
Ombre and Balayage
Another option is to apply darker shades at the top and lighter colors toward the bottom part of your hair to create the illusion of length and promote a thinner face.
Having a wide face is not something to shy away from. After all, if you got it, you should flaunt it, right?
However, you always have the option to make it look thinner and smaller and you can easily do that by choosing any of the face slimming hair color trends we’ve shared with you in this article.
