The Great Hair Experiment

Back to the ol' grind!  I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Years.

My lovely vacation is over and I'm back at work, with a lot of  minimal pouting and teeth gnashing. 

Did I enjoy my break?  Yes.  Did I get anything accomplished during my break?  Ehhh.....well, I got a couple of things scratched off my to-do list.  But mostly I was a big ol' bum. 

I was so lazy that I didn't even keep up with reading blogs.  I'll get caught up this week, I promise!  :)

I did have fun breaking in my new camera and will get some photos posted soon from Christmas and New Years Eve. 

One thing I did do over break was experiment with vintage hair and makeup.  The makeup is the easier part, it's just a matter of buying the right products/colors and then making sure to not make oneself look like a scary clown.

The hair is more frustrating, unfortunately.  For, you see, I'm losing my hair.  To be more accurate - for everyone loses hair - the hair that is falling out is not being replaced by new growth.  It's always been baby fine texture-wise, but until I started losing it I never realized, or appreciated, how thick (or rather, how much of it I had) it was. 

That poses a problem for vintage hair, because most of those old styles were accomplished by doing pincurl sets.....and I don't have enough hair, when sectioned off, to form a pincurl.  A proper one that is; meaning bigger round than the size of a Cheerio.  I'd love to find a stylist who knows how to do those old methods of hair dressing and find out if I'm just completely doing them wrong, or if it's truly not possible with the state of my hair right now.  There's actually a hair salon downtown that's been there for decades and has the outdated feel and look of the kind of place that caters to "little old ladies", and not young trendy people.  I haven't worked up the courage to try it out yet. 

I can just see it now, calling to make an appointment:  "Um, yes, I was just wondering....do you have people there that know how to do hair the old fashioned way?"

Silence on the other end of the line, then: "How do you mean, "old fashioned?"

"I mean, pincurls and heat sets and wet sets and fingerwaves and the lot."

"You mean you want to look like a little old lady?"

"Uhhhhh........yes."

They'd probably laugh at me or think I'm nuts.  Well, I am a little nuts, so what the heck, right?  I'm waiting on the horrendous layers I got the last time I got my hair(s) trimmed to grow out; I had asked for long layers and she took it upon herself to "update" me a little by giving me the oh-so-trendy uneven, choppy, razored layers.  Unwanted and unasked for, grr.  My pathetic hair takes a looooong time to grow too and I'm getting impatient.  Perhaps next month they (the layers) will have grown out enough to give me an excuse to go to this new/old place for a trim and I can scope out my vintage possibilities then.

In the meantime, however, I've been trying to emulate a pincurl set by using my curling iron (3/4" barrel).  I found a hairstyle I liked and by following the pincurl diagram, make the curls (sausage curls, I look like Shirley Temple while doing it!) with the iron winding clockwise or counter-clockwise as the diagram states.  I've had to adjust the sections though to accomodate for my thin hair, but so far it hasn't turned out that bad.  Of course it's not as good as it could be had I thicker hair, but I'm liking that it's giving me some curls and bounce and has a more vintage feel to it.  You'll be able to see what I mean once I get off my duff and get the pictures downloaded off the new camera, heh. 

In fact, the basic shape of the hairstyle I'm trying to copy resembles the one in the new photo of Ginger I have at the top of the page.  My hair is that short, so it works.  Of course it doesn't look that good, but I'm just going for anything resembling it.  By experimenting I'm definitely learning how the different directions (clockwise/counter-clockwise) makes a difference in the overall shape of how the curls lie. 

Actually I think I'll get that photo downloading done this evening after work and then repost this with the photos in it.  Duh is me!