 |
| Note: it helps if you curl your own hair |
My hair, although quite thick, is also fine and not quite shoulder length. I could curl my own hair but I fear it would look more like Afro than hedgehog. The second option was stolen from Lauren at American Duchess who did some curling magic on a half-wig and somehow got the perfect 1780s hairstyle.
You know costume envy? Well, I had wig envy. It was easy enough to acquire my own cheap synthetic half-wig, that despite doubts actually matched my hair alright. I went for the cheapest because I knew very well this adventure of mine could be a disaster, forever writing off the wig.
The second was curling method. There are two methods of styling a wig, dependent upon the type of hair. The first is to put curlers in, then give the wig a bath in boiling water before letting it dry out. I originally intended to do that until, as if by fate, I found a video on YouTube.
I'm not sure if many of you are aware of Janet Stephens, a historical hairdresser. She has a YouTube channel where she posts videos about historic hair recreations. One of them is dedicated to Papillote curls.
This is a historical curling method that was widely used in the latter half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th to create those perfect spiral curls we see in paintings of the time. It involves using tissue paper to curl the hair. You wrap a section of hair around your fingers, wrap the curl in tissue paper, and then apply heat. It protects the hair from the heat, and means you can leave the curl to cool whilst still in shape. Watch the video, it's amazing!
I wanted to try this so badly. I knew I'd never be able to do it on my own hair, but it would be a lot easier on a wig. Thankfully the wig I bought was heat-resistant, meaning I could use this method.
There was a good and bad thing about this wig. It is really synthetic. What I mean by this is that there is no way anyone is going to mistake it for human hair. It tangles easily, and has that plastic shine so many wigs do, but again, I've seen worse. The other bad thing is that it's "layered". Because it's made for modern women, the hair isn't all one length, which can either be bad or good. Some are short, probably about the length of my hair, whilst some others are almost waist length.
I curled the longer hairs nearer the bottom with the mind that these would be the "tail" so often seen hanging from a hedgehog. I'm not going to lie, this took a while. The sections were about half an inch thick, although some varied as the strands were quite hard to separate. Wrapping also takes some dexterity, especially trying to keep the strand in the coil. I've never been blessed with hair-dressing skills, so it might just have been me.
I felt like I'd used at least 4 sheets of tissue paper and wasn't even half done. Since I have a full-time occupation, I managed to do it in 5 sessions of roughly 30-45 minutes. So, quite long.
After everything was cool I started to pull out the paper papillotes by their tails, as instructed, during the first episode of season 4 of Poldark.
Like I had suspected at the beginning, the longer layers at the bottom were still a bit too long. Than came the fun part: shaking the hell out of it.
Synthetic wigs are very tangle-oriented so it's not easy to drag your hands through the curls like the instructions said. Instead I just separated curls where possible, and ended up sacrificing kirby grips to the longer pieces of hair.
 |
| May need to re-think the ribbon |
