I almost always use strand based hair. Transmapped hair is troublesome; it's pretty hard to get realist gravity results. Strand based hair calculated against a low poly proxy gives far more realistic results.
For strand based hair, setting up dark hair colors is fairly easy. Setting up a good blond color, however - I haven't managed to do that yet.
An advantage is that the specular highlghts appear where they should - they're not painted.
A drawback of strand based hair is resource usage, although with Poser Pro on a 64 bit OS with a decent amount of RAM (8 GB) it's not as troublesome as it used to be.

As for painting hair - I haven't seen an image yet where the painted hair didn't somehow clash with the rendered skin, unless the skin was also heavily postworked.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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