You can contour your face, you can contour your body, and now you can also contour your hair. Some colorists have begun throwing around the term "hair contouring" to describe a detailed process of strategically highlighting and lowlighting hair to enhance and flatter a person's face shape.
"Hair contouring uses freehand coloring and highlighting to enhance face shapes," explains Nick Penna, a colorist and the owner of SalonCapri in Boston. "Highlighting and shading certain parts of the hair can create the illusion of a different face shape, depending on what you want to accentuate." If you're thinking that sounds pretty similar to the makeup type of contouring, you'd be correct. "Just like the makeup technique, light shades are for highlighting and darker shades are for creating a shadow effect." Penna points to this photo of Sarah Jessica Parker as a good example of hair contouring: