Hair

I mentioned DIY hair in the last post, so here’s more on that.

The good news is, M’s hair is lovely without any styling:

The bad news is that in the grand tradition of All Girls Everywhere Always, she wanted exactly the opposite of what she had, meaning curly hair instead of straight hair.

Well. It was a project. I watched multiple Youtube videos and took notes. Then I bought some hair products, because we just don’t have much in the way of hair products around our house.

Here are the tips I learned about curling fine, straight hair:

• Start with somewhat dirty hair or clean hair with texturizing spray (top right) to get the hair to hold the curl better.
• Use the curling iron beginning from to top of the hair, close to the roots, then curling the other hair directly around the metal of the curling iron so it’s well heated throughout and the most curling “power” is concentrated up high. Move the curling iron down that one section and keep curling if the hair’s long (like M’s).
• Gently slide the curled-up hair off the curling iron and keep it rolled by clipping it (like the ones I bought) so that it stays curled until as it cools. This is also a good time to spray some hairspray. Keep the curled hair in clips while you finish the whole head of hair.
• When all the clipped curls have cooled completely (which might mean a cold shot from a blow drier to speed up the process) and the curls have been sprayed with hairspray, pull the clips out, then gently loosen the curls.

Phew! We did a practice round last weekend, and it went. . . okay, but not entirely terrific. So I wasn’t sure exactly how it was going to go, and I was very excited for the hair-curling part to be over already.

M had decided that she wanted some of her hair pulled back in an elastic band, so we did that part first. It was at that point that I really started panicking. We wanted the hair stretching from her forehead to the little ponytail to be completely smooth, and it kept on looking not exactly right, with a little bubble or loose spot in one place or another. I think I got it on the fourth try, but at one point I had to cut some of her hair off because it was tangled in the hairband, and then a minute or two later I had to pull my fleece off because I was starting to stress-sweat. All I could think was, “This was supposed to be the easy part!! I still have all the actual curling to do!” Lucky for me M was entirely relaxed at this stage: I think she was happier with my practice round than I was, so her overall confidence in my abilities was higher than mine. While I was muttering to myself and sweating, she was saying,”We’ve got this, mom!” and playfully batting her gigantic eyelashes at us in the mirror.

Once we moved on to actually curling her hair, it went fine. I started out in full panic mode, so I did a few curls on each side of her face first, just in case I ran out of time before I got to everything else. But the practice the previous week had helped, for sure. It was clear that the curls wouldn’t last forever, but they held up through the pictures and the walk-in, and she even had a smidgen of waviness the next morning.  She was happy with her hair, so I was happy with it.

She spent the whole night dancing, though, so it’s entirely possible that next year we’re going to need a nice, neck-cooling bun. Which means I’ll be checking out more Youtube videos!