10 Best Hair Highlight Kits 2024 in the US

There are a number of reasons for highlighting your hair. When the hair around your face is a lighter color than the rest of your hair, it emphasizes your facial features. Or maybe you want to make your hair look fuller. When your hair is in different hues of light and dark, it adds dimension. Or perhaps you’re looking at giving your hair a “sun-kissed” look. Also, highlighting hair can help conceal greying hair. If any of these reasons appeal to you, perhaps you should check out a good hair highlighting kit!

DIY hair highlighting has its risks, however. They usually contain bleach, or other caustic chemicals, to lighten your hair color. If not done properly, a hair highlighter can give your hair an undesirable “brassy” hue. It takes even more effort to undo that. Also, bleach can affect the strength and resilience of your hair. You have to take special precautions against hair damage. But, going to a salon can cost over $100, and sometimes as much as $300 or more! If you just want to experiment, without doing anything very fancy, you can find a hair highlighting kit that is both easy and safe to use. And they usually cost no more than $20 for a treatment! That’s big savings!

We’ll go through some of the items in the MSN list of the best hair highlighting kits. You’ll see some of the features and tricks that some kits offer, as well as some professional pointers on applying a hair highlighter. Once you get the hang of it, you should be able to achieve stunning results!

(You can also check out other hair care and beauty products among the MSN buying guides.)

What Types of Hair Highlighting Kits Are There?

Most kits for performing highlighting at home contain the same tools: gloves, a highlighting cap, applicators, and more. But, we can distinguish between two types of hair highlighting formulas, and how they work:

• Heat-activated: Applying heat to your hair, either with a blow dryer or wand, will open up the hair cuticle. This step will allow the color to penetrate into the hair strand, for longer-lasting results. The BTZ Beyond the Zone Rock-On Radical Highlighting Kit recommends applying heat after using their product.

BTZ Beyond the Zone Rock-On Radical Highlighting Kit

• Chemical-activated: There are also highlighting products that don’t require heat, and rely on chemical means to penetrate the hair cuticle. An example is the Punky Personal Home Hair Highlight Kit. it uses the peroxide developer to open up the hair cuticle. The kit includes disposable gloves, a highlighting cap and hook, powder bleach, cream peroxide developer, and an applicator brush.

Punky Personal Home Hair Highlight Kit

What Are Some Features of the Best Hair Highlighting Kits?

Besides the basic bleach and developer, some kits provide additional products:

• Purple shampoo: If you have darker hair, there is a chance that a highlighter will produce an unnatural “brass” color. Therefore, hair stylists recommend using a purple shampoo to wash your hair after using a highlighter. Purple is simply the complement of yellow in the color wheel. It will neutralize any excessively yellow or orange color. Thus, it will prevent this dreaded “brassy” look.

• Conditioner: Since highlighters contain chemicals that may be harsh on your hair, it’s recommended to apply conditioner. There are highlighter kits that include a conditioner, such as the Revlon Color Effects Frost and Glow Hair Highlight Kit.

Revlon Color Effects Frost and Glow Hair Highlight Kit

Here are some professional tips for selecting and applying a highlighter:

• Amount of time to use highlighter: The amount of time that you should apply the hair highlighter before rinsing it out will vary, according to the natural color of your hair. The makers of the Punky Colour Personal Home Hair Highlighting Kit advise the following times to apply their product, by natural hair color:
  • - Light Blonde to Dark Blonde: 10-15 minutes
  • - Light Brown: 10-20 minutes
  • - Medium Brown: 10-45 minutes
  • - Dark Brown to Black: 10-60 minutes

• Using a highlighting cap: Some kits provide a highlighting cap with small holes in it (or they require you to make holes in the cap yourself). Then, using a wand that resembles a crochet hook, you pull strands of hair through holes in the cap. This will allow you to apply the highlighter on particular strands of hair, while the rest of the hair is protected from the highlighter. One advantage of the cap is that you can draw a pattern onto the cap of where exactly you’d like to apply the highlighter. You then paint the highlighter to all of the hair sticking out of the cap. After letting it sit for the required amount of time of around 10-15 minutes, you then shampoo out the highlighter. Although drawing the strands of hair through the holes in the cap seems tedious, the method is actually one of the easiest and fastest ways to apply a highlighter. You can finish the entire process in one hour!

• Caution with the highlighter cap: Expert hairdressers say that the cap may give uneven results because it’s hard to get the same amount of hair going through each hole. Some hair styling professionals make a point of throwing away the highlighter cap, and just applying the highlighter with their fingers!

• Aluminum foil for highlighting broad strips of hair: Instead of using the cap provided, some prefer using aluminum foil to apply highlighter. In this technique, you take broad bunches of hair and wrap them in aluminum foil. The foil keeps different sections of hair separate so that only particular patches of your hair are treated. You apply the highlighter solution, and fold the foil with the hair wrapped inside. This is more time-consuming than using the highlighter cap, since you have to wrap and paint each patch separately, instead of all at once as when using a cap. In order that the results come out uniform it’s recommended to section your hair first with the foil, and only then apply the highlighter.

• Selecting highlighter according to your natural color: When you purchase a hair highlighter kit, it will have a shade guide, which tells you how light your hair can be, based on your base color (that is, your natural hair color). You generally can’t get your hair more than one shade lighter than your base color at any one application. If you want your hair lighter, you may have to apply the product several times.

• Special combs: There are also special combs, called “highlighting boards”, which grasp a clump of hair and stretch it out, to make it easier to apply a highlighter. These boards come in short, medium, and long lengths, for different lengths of hair.

Balayage Highlighting Board and Brush Kit, with boards in three lengths

Wrap Up

We’ve covered some of the products in the MSN list of the best hair highlighter kits. On the one hand, you can get exquisite results trying to apply a highlighter yourself. And it’s a fraction of the cost of a visit to a salon. As long as you exercise caution, and strictly follow the instructions on the box, you should succeed in getting near-professional results!