I’ve been highlighting strictly without foil for about 8 years now, and even before then I considered myself to be a balayage specialist. My time at Whittemore House Salon in NYC was really the turning point for me where I began to see how it was possible to serve an entire clientele with hair painting only. There wasn’t a foil to be seen in the entire salon. Actually, it wasn’t allowed. Everyone worked in the same mode, and everyone’s skills were fully developed in this method of highlighting that they called hair painting. They could achieve results that up until that point, I didn’t really know how to produce with my intermediate knowledge of balayage. Before then, I didn’t know how to talk about balayage vs foil with clients, and I hadn't yet the expertise to handle most clients without occasionally relying on foil highlighting.