What Is a Money Piece in Hair?

A money piece focuses brightness where people see it first: around the face. It can be bold or soft depending on the color, contrast and placement.

Money piece vs face-framing highlights

Face-framing highlights describe the placement. Money piece usually describes a more noticeable front highlight result.

Money piece with bangs

A money piece hair look works with bangs, you just have to place it around the fringe instead of through it. When you have bangs, I lift the money piece on the two pieces that fall just behind the fringe, the strands that sweep back toward your cheekbone. That keeps the brightness reading as a frame, not a stripe sitting on top of your forehead.

On a curtain fringe or a soft side-swept bang, I paint the lift starting a little lower, around eye level, so the bright color shows when the bangs part. On a blunt fringe I drop the start point even further, almost to the chin, because a heavy blunt bang hides anything sitting higher than the brow.

The one thing I watch in my chair is the fringe getting bleached by accident. The bang grows out fast and any lift on it looks brassy and uneven in weeks. So I foil the money piece sections clean and leave the actual fringe its natural depth.

Money piece on dark brown hair

A money piece hair look on dark brown hair takes more lift and more patience than it does on a base that is already light. Dark brown sits around a level 3 or 4, and a blonde money piece on brown hair usually needs to climb to a level 8 or 9. That is several levels of lift, so I almost always foil it twice rather than push one harsh round of bleach through fragile front pieces.

When I lift dark hair this far, the warm pigment underneath shows up as orange and red before it ever gets near pale gold. That is the brassiness people are scared of. I control it with a low-volume developer, slow processing, and a Schwarzkopf toner at the bowl to knock the orange back and land on a soft, natural blonde instead of a yellow band.

To keep it looking real on a dark base, I feather the very top of the money piece so the line where dark meets blonde stays diffused. A hard line on dark brown reads like a mistake. A soft melt reads like the front of your hair just catches more light. If you want a broader sun-lightened version of this on a dark base, my hand-painted balayage in Venice blends the same way across more of the head.