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| Me, 2nd grade. See? Flat hair. |
As a child, my mother would just wash it, brush it, trim the bangs and call it a day. As a teenager I would get lift with back combing and hairspray, but this was the early '90s, and trends took a long time to get up here; we were still in mid-'80s mode. No, back then, the girls my age and I, we had no clue how the back of our heads looked, but the fronts were amazeballs sculptures to the hair metal gods. I even had pink hair for a while, and this was in 1988 North Idaho: such things were not done. I caught a lot of flack from the church people for my red, red lips, pink hair, and Cyndi Lauper/butt rock dress code. (The fact that I went from no boobs to DD in one winter didn't help matters with the deacons any, either.)
Anyway... hair. I've never known what to do with mine. I brush it, keep it off my face, but, by and large, I have no damned clue how to style it. I went to a salon one time to have them chop my waist-length hair off to some manageable length, and all the stylist did was trim off about a quarter inch, despite my protestations that I wanted something different. "No," she says, "you're Rapunzel!" Another time, I went in to get a color and style and the stylists refused to work on my hair, citing that my at-home coloring would mess them up and ruin my hair... blah, blah, blah. So, since I can't get anyone to do anything with it, I do it myself.
Of course, I have no clue what I am doing. I hate how flat my hair lays, so I have tried everything this side of a perm to get it to have some volume. (You can either color *or* perm, my grandmother told me... I believed her.) As a teenager and young adult, I used a crimping iron, but the style got so out of fashion that I eventually turned to pincurling, considering that curling irons did exactly jack and sh** to my hair. But even that wouldn't hold for longer than a few hours.
Recently, I have started using magnetic rollers on top of my head, pin curls everywhere else, and spraying the lot with Lottabody setting lotion, which I have found works well. A set of curls set with Lottabody tends to hold a couple of days, and it does seem to give some volume. I generally wet set my hair after a shower, and then, a day or two later, dry set it and spritz with Lottabody and leave it overnight, and strangely enough, I've found that the dry set curls last about twice as long as the wet set ones. Both look about the same when I remove the rollers and pins, but I can get three to four days of curls out of a dry set.
For styling, I take a wide toothed hair pick and run it along my scalp and lift through the first inch or two of my hair away from my scalp, separating the hairs and creating volume close to my head. I then backcomb along the top, back, and sides, smooth the top, sculpt the bangs, and spray the lot (especially the roots) with a little hairspray, and ba-da-bing! Something resembling volume and an actual hairstyle:
And then I top it off with one of my handmade hairflowers to match my outfit!
So, in conclusion, clearly, I have no clue what I am doing, but I think it looks okay, for all that. One of these days, I'll figure out how to make my hair look sculpted, but, in the meantime, this is what I got. :)
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