Did you know? Trying to do any hairstyle to your own head is physically impossible.* Even something as seemingly straightforward as a simple braid can’t be done; one of the three sections is always slipping through your fingers like a bunch of ghost dicks. Not even the most accomplished of witches can insert a bobby pin without hearing it slide helplessly to the floor the minute she turns her head. Maybe someone else can do these things to your hairs, but I’m skeptical. Have you ever successfully completed a hairstyle by yourself? Be honest. Hairstyles are just lies your head tells other people.
*It is possible I am overgeneralizing based on my own experience.
23. High Ponytails
It’s difficult enough to put all of your hair pointing in the same direction, but trying to scroonch it up towards the sky is asking for trouble. You’re going to lose chunks of hair here; they’ll slide off piecemeal at first but pretty soon it’ll build up into an avalanche and your wrist will hurt.
22. Loose Waves
Have you ever tried to curl the hair on your own head? If your hair already comes pre-curled, then congratulations, you have a hairstyle. Loose waves do not exist. Straight hair that has been artificially curled comes in exactly two forms: I Just Took The Curler Off This Second and The Curl Is Gone, I Have No More Curls. Loose curls forsooth.
21. That Thing Of Where You Wrap A Tiny Strand Of Hair Around Your Ponytail Elastic To Make It Look Like Your Hair Generated Its Own Ponytail
Where does that strand of hair come from. Where does it go.
20. Festival Hair
You know that hair I mean. Where there’s a headband that’s also kind of a little scarf, and parts of it are under the hair and parts of it are over the hair and there’s curls around it also? That’s not a possible thing to do to your head.
19. Infinity Buns
The bun that disappears in on itself, like a little vortex.
18. Sock Buns
Put a sock ringlet inside of your head-hairs, and somehow a bun will appear. I do not buy it.
17. Beachy Waves
Also a lie. See crimping.
16. Heidi Braids, Like A Crown
To begin with, making a braid by yourself is impossible. Taking braids that by all laws of God and man should be hanging downward and flinging them up over your own head is laughable. How do you even make two braids? By the time you finish the first one (you will never finish the first one), all of your hair will be used up. Where would the second braid come from? How could you divide your hair into two sections, and then into three sections again, and then bring all those sections together? What does the second lump of hair do while you’re braiding the first? Slide right into that braid you’re trying to make, is what.
15. Knots
“Just tie your hair into other parts of your hair,” they say. “It won’t make the sound of spaghetti getting slurped up and immediately dissolve into nothingness. We promise.”
14. Finger Waves
I could stick my fingers in my hair all damn day and I wouldn’t come out of it looking like Daisy Buchanan, or whomever. One doesn’t naturally follow the other. “Put your finger in your hair and press it tightly and you’ll have a curled-up head.” No, I won’t. Pinch your nose and tomorrow you’ll have different colored eyes. See, I can lie about the provenance of personal appearance too.
13. French Braids
I think I wore my hair in French braids once. Monica Kowalski may have French braided my hair at a sleepover in junior high, but I may be misremembering. She brought a big kit of makeup that night, and the excitement of it all may have clouded my memory.
12. A Regular Ponytail That Doesn’t Devolve Into A Side Part
All ponytails will slide off your head eventually. It’s an inherently unstable system.
11. Turning Your Long Hair Into That Fake Bob
Make your hair reverse itself, and tuck it up under more of your hair, and hide it there somehow, and now you have a different length of hair. I detest hair secrecy, and this is ridiculous. “Oh, did Betholomew get a haircut?” “No, she’s hidden all of her hair up inside of her other hair.” “Ah, yes, I can see the big bump of hiding hair on her head right now.”
10. What Is A Diffuser
What Does It Do
9. That Thing Of It’s Sort Of A Beehive But Just On Top With A Bump Kind Of?
How do you make part of your hair do one thing, and the rest of it another thing. How many hands do you have, and where do you put the inert hair when you’re activating the rest.
8. Putting A Pencil In Your Hair Like My Friend Natalie Used To Do But I Could Never Figure Out How
She’d just twist it up and put a pencil in it and that would be that. It just stayed there, like all those unfortunate princes who got caught in the hedge forest surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s palace before the winning prince got there.
7. Dry Shampoo
Now your hair is the same, but with powder in it. Nothing happened. And don’t tell me it’s just as good as washing your hair, because I have washed my hair, I am close personal friends with washing my hair, and you sir are no washing my hair.
6. “Backcombing”
It’s just pushing your hair in the wrong direction. It doesn’t work. It just makes your hair snackle and jump out at you and it feels awful.
5. That Inside-Out Braid
Where it looks like a regular braid that someone flayed the skin off of it. Only devil hands can make a fishtail braid.
4. Flat Irons
Now you have hot hair. In a minute your hair will stop being hot. Then it will be like nothing happened to your head at all.
3. Blow Drying Your Own Hair With That Blow Drying Brush
It can’t be done. Once you get the brush under a section of head, it’s impossible to do anything other than slowly pull it out to the end of your hair. You can’t twist it or make it go in any particular direction. And you can’t get the blow dryer anywhere near it, because the rest of your hair is flooshooping into your eyes and your face is hot and your hand hurts.
2. Having A Bun That Doesn’t Slowly Migrate Off Your Head
They just…slide down and out, like a drunk friend who doesn’t want to keep walking.
1. Hair Products
Now you have goop in your hair. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just goop, and now you have to wash your hair again. Your hair grows out of your head, and then it falls off, and in between nothing else happens except for sometimes you can wash it.
***
The following are hairstyles that I have been able to replicate in the wild and am convinced exist.
6. Washing Your Hair and Going To Bed
What will it look like? You’ll find out in the morning.
5. Washing Your Hair In The Morning and Letting Nature Take Its Course
Things just get sort of progressively drier, and then the day is over, and there you are.
4. Trapping Your Hair In A Claw Cage
This one is tricky; this one requires skill. Snap your head forward such that all of your hair tumbles over your forehead toward the ground. Seize as much of it as you can and sort of frunge it toward the top of your head and wrestle as much as possible into one of those little plastic claws they sell at the Walgreen’s. Not too little. About as big as your first, the claw should be. Then trap your hair in the little claw prison. This is but a temporary solution to a permanent problem, but it will put your hair in a particular location for at least a few hours.
3. Cutting Off Your Hair Or Putting On A Hat
I don’t have anything else to say about this.
2. Run Your Fingers Through Your Hair
Now your hair has fallen into a slightly different position. If you are Rider Strong circa 1998, your hair looks terrific.
1. Having Someone Else Do Your Hair To You
Sometimes they’ll want money, but there’s no helping that.
Tags: beauty, ghost dicks, hairstyles, it’s possible i’m extrapolating over-generally from my own personal experience, the impossible
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MALLORY YOU ARE CORRECT ON ALL COUNTS. What does hair do. Why is it.
I can accomplish these hairstyles: low ponytail, high ponytail, straightening, using a curling iron, half-up half-down with barrette, pigtails. Anything more than this is witchcraft. (Although I can use a diffuser, but probably not correctly.) Even those “20 Lazy Girl Hairstyle Hacks” are TOTALLY BEYOND ME.
And in addition to this my natural part is bang down the center of my head so if I’m not careful I look like Wednesday Addams. And if I part it somewhere else it HURTS. Do other people not have the same issue??? Why must I have this center part? I don’t always want to look like a 70s reject! What if I want to cut bangs! They’ll be all parted in the middle and I’ll look like a 90s male teen idol!
Back when it was on TV (before the invention of Nickelodeon), a kid at school asked me if my name were Wednesday. My ugly center part and flat hair made me look like a child star! Very briefly. A long, long time ago. Today’s my birthday, a big one. ::sigh::
Man, Wednesday ruled. Also a long, long time ago, before cable TV and 100 channels of reruns, I used to watch “The Addams Family” and stretch out my sweater cuffs and stare deadpan into the mirror, hoping that if I cultivated the Wednesday Addams affect, I might grow into a graceful, morbid Morticia.
Also, this.
!http://media.tumblr.com/e1797e1ec66b567dc7ee72d620ee6a27/tumblr_inline_mfco4wOBdu1qjxfzm.gif!
ugh i am an embarrassing idiot what is gifs
I changed to a side part in late high school, and I haven’t been able to get it to change again since
HOW DID YOU GET IT TO CHANGE
sheer force of will I think. I was about 16-17 and willing to deal with forcibly gelling it down and the ensuing headaches for months on end. I don’t think I could go through it again.
I have done this. Ok so wash your hair and bring a mirror into the shower with you. After it’s washed when your hair is super soaking wet (I actually stand under the water for this) comb your hair back, and then part it. Then comb it flat. Then hang out under the water for a bit to let everything settle and then get out and pat your hair dry (I usually skip the wrapping up in a turban part for this because I don’t want to disturb the part). If your hair is really stubborn you can do this every time you shower for a week, but honestly it should only take one or two tries.
If that fails, get a haircut and tell them you’re changing your part and they’ll do it for you and blow dry everything so it settles.
Also, you mentioned above that you have issues with your bangs splitting in the center because of your part. What you do for this is you a round brush, put it under your bangs (like, as if you were rolling it from underneath) and brush them all to the left for a bit, then all the way to the right for a bit, then brush back (still from underneath) in the center. If your hair is stubborn do this while blow drying them. If you’re worried about ending up with 80s bangs from the brushing, don’t, unless you’re using a gigantic round brush and hair spray you’ll be fine and they will be normal. You can always brush them flat afterwards if you’re nervous.
I also changed my part a few years ago, from one side to the other. Of course I decided to start doing this like two days before my college graduation, and the initial weirdness of the new-ish hairstyle combined with some sort of cold/exhaustion that made my face all puffy meant that I look terrible and not like myself in all my graduation pictures! yay!
But yeah, you can change your part. You just kinda… do it.
AHA! now I know what hairstyle I am trying to go for that I can’t come up with words to describe, I am definitely looking for the Wednesday Addams/70s reject style
I feel your part-pain so much….
I know!! The most earth-shattering thing I ever did to my hair was change the part from the middle to the side (so fashion!) when I was about 22 (throug sheer pain tolerence during a school holiday). I am 31 now. For me, that was revolutionary. Any changes to my part, even when I try the wet hair or blow dry method are filled with pain and eventually flop back over. If I try to comb my hair back into that part-less pony tail all females wear i get mega headache within 10 minutes tops. Yet taking the thing ut, and all my hair flops back to its natural way is even more agony! Then blessed blessed relief. I have three styles for my dead straight brown hair: Out, low pony tail, low ponytail then put into a plait (for things like recieving an award from the queen)
What you do is stop washing your hair for a week so all your roots are clogged up with accumulated oil/product and nothing is lying flat anywhere. Then you make your new part and brush your hair flat right before you get in the shower. After you get out of the shower, you re-establish the new part and put your hair in a ponytail or braid that forces the hair to dry how you want it. (You can do this as frequently as you’re willing to let your scalp get truly revolting. I have like 3 different parts alternating all through finals.)
OMG, Mallory! You are right on every point. I have tried (and failed) and almost every one of these. I recently got a cut that looks right when I ignore my hair, even in windy central Texas. I just wash and ignore. I love it.
thank god my hair comes precurled
Yes. And the nice thing is that it looks even better after I’ve done vigorous exercise. The sweat makes it better.
my hair never looks better than after it’s been straightened, unwashed for ~2 days, and then subjected to my cardio routine.
I have no idea what I’d do if it weren’t.
also forgive me for sounding so creepy, but Mallory, you must have the smoothest, silkiest hair in all the land if you can’t get it to stay in ponytails/buns
They actually sell hair ties now that are essentially just sticky rubber bands. My hair is super silky the day after I wash it, and damn with these things it doesn’t go ANYWHERE.
The trade-off is that it hurts like a motherfucker when you remove the band because it’s really just a sticky rubber band adhering to your skull somehow.
ow ow ow ow that sounds terrible.
I cut them out, with scissors. Single use items.
I love the in-between ones that have both regular wrapped elastic and a band of stickiness on one side. My high ponytail is in one right now, and it looks awesome (it even helps me keep some volume on top while maintaining a non-moving tail).
I have a bunch of those and it kills to pull them out AND my cat likes to eat them so mostly they are not a good fit for my life.
I refuse to believe that French Braids really exist. They are just an April Fools joke that has gone on for far too long. Nobody can french braid hair. Nobody.
My hair style is wash hair in morning and let it dry all on its own. If it is humid there might be a little bit of curl to it once it is dry. If the weather is dry, then my hair just hangs there mocking me.
French braids were real circa the year 2000 to the year 2002 when I was in marching band and the color guard girls would French braid all of the band girls’ hair on the bus so we could tuck it under our dorky bucket hats.
I wish I could get some of the color guard wisdom now. I’d put my hair in French braids and never think about it again.
My ballet teacher just forced us to practice constantly. They are real, but you have to keep trying it (preferably while watching Gilmore Girls or Judging Amy).
Not convinced. You are all lying.
La la la. (puts fingers in ears).
To be fair, teens have so much more time than we adults. My amazing niece has sooo much time because her mama is so frightened of so much and curtails her kids’ world significantly. They aren’t even online. So there are hours and hours available for practicing one’s hair braiding in her world. But she has a helluvan open-minded aunt (me, of course!) who will introduce her to a bigger world at every opportunity.
French braids are always real to marching band ladies. There is no alternative.
My niece is amazing. (Yes, she is. I’ll hurt anyone who says different!) She can French braid her hair in a few seconds in a moving vehicle, no mirror, effortlessly. The result is always beautiful, as is she. Must be some amazing genetics from her father, not from my family.
I once French braided my hair on a moving subway without holding on to anything. It was the pinnacle of my braiding achievement. FRENCH BRAIDS ARE REAL.
I was raised by Scandinavians. French braids were taught to me when my hair got long enough to make them and my hands became nimble enough to teach a braid, because my mom didn’t want to have to do them for me anymore. I basically practiced on a big disembodied Barbie head my mom got me (I think they called it the “Barbie Stylin’ Head”??).
I became that girl that all the other girls at school would mob and ask “WILL YOU BRAID MY HAIR?” especially once I got into the marching band.
Yes, no hairstyles exist. Except for if you attempt them with curly hair, instead of dissolving into nothingness, it will condense into knots at weird angles.
I could do the pencil thing, but the secret is that all of the weight of your hair is condensed into the point of the pencil and pressed into your skull and is incredibly painful and also will fall down in twenty minutes.
you can distribute the weight some if you put another pencil through perpendicular to the first one, but then you look like you’ve got a pirate flag stuck to the back of your head
Hold on, what is the downside of looking like you’ve got a pirate flag stuck to the back of your head?
well, it IS pretty handy for stabbing people.
on the other hand, “people” is code for “the back of your own neck” most of the time.
If you forget that’s how you’ve done your hair and walk under low hanging clotheslines, you can almost break your own fool neck.
I have friends with hair that falls like corn-silk when it air dries who are always saying, “I wish I had your hair! Mine can’t hold a style!” And I’m just like “BITE YOUR TONGUE, LEST YOU TOO ARE CURSED WITH HAIR THAT LOOKS AND BEHAVES LIKE MARJORY THE GARBAGE HEAP FROM FRAGGLE ROCK. HAVING NATURALLY STRAIGHT HAIR IN 2014 IS A HAIRSTYLE, YOU INGRATE.”
A+ reference to Marjory
Yes, thank you!
I have been known to send emails to a friend of mine saying “this is what my hair looks like today” and attaching a picture of a dandelion gone to seed.
I have been able to successfully accomplish 22, 18, and 16. Everything else on the first list is a mystery to me. And I am close personal friends with the second list.
The trick to good buns:
1. Put you hair in a ponytail
2. braid the ponytail (with another elastic at the end)
3. Wrap the braid up into a bun and pin in there with ALL THE BOBBY PINS YOU HAVE
If you can do a nice ponytail, you can do a nice braided bun. (Though you might have to use a little bit of gel if your hair is cut in layers)
And by the way, washing your hair and going to bed isn’t a bad idea. Wash your hair and then brush it and then braid it and then you DON’T HAVE TO BRUSH IT IN THE MORNING.
God almighty I wish I could braid my hair and not do anything to it in the morning. If I sleep in a braid I wake up with about three strands of hair still braid and the rest sticking into outer space. And it gets HUGE. I think that would be perfection.
Unless you’re a messy sleeper/bad at braids. And then you wake up and the braid has shifted to over your ear, and your other ear looks like it’s being attacked by a space monster. This has been my experience with every “sleep on it and it’ll look lovely in the morning” hairstyle.
Yeah, as much as I read those articles, my hair hasn’t learned to read yet and isn’t aware that THIS SHOULD LOOK GOOD IN THE MORNING GODDAMMIT.
What might work is putting a bun alllll the way at the top of your head? That way when you sleep you aren’t actually on top of the bun, it just sticks out behind you and rests on the pillow. It might help to make the bun fairly tight, and then wrap it up in a scarf to prevent bits from being yanked out, but it could be worth a shot.
I wash my hair at night and then go to bed because otherwise it would take the entirety of my day for it to dry. (I guess I could use a hairdryer but that takes like 20-30 minutes and I don’t have patience for this.) My hair basically ends up curly like it would if I washed my hair in the morning.
LOL BITCH WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT BRAIDS
this might be my fav sentence thats ever been on The Toast
I do that, but then the hair in the braid is still wet in the AM (which is fine, because air-drying = curls)
If I went to sleep with even damp hair, I would wake up with one flat side and one side that resembled an overgrown shrubbery. If I went to sleep with damp braided hair, it would still be wet in the morning, and my nose would be cold. Night showers are just not for me.
I have to figure out the bun thing – I have three daughters in dance and I’m beginning to suspect the twice-yearly notes sent home about the “bun situation” are directed solely at me.
Wash it, brush it, hope it looks good when it dries.
SOMETIMES I blow-dry it, but then it goes huge and fluffy.
Hair: A load of dead keratin tendrils that humans are inexplicably obsessed with
Or as I think of them, tiny long hoof/fingernail hybrids!!!
There is another story here, which is, Lies Your Hairstylist/Barber Tell You. It starts with this:
“Oh, this is super easy. You’ll be able to just wash it and go!”
I think I have the same kind of hair as you: nothing works, nothing stays. So I chopped it all off and now the only styling required is ‘rumple hands over head, make sure there’s no Little Rascals bit sticking straight up at the crown’. It is a better, happier way to live.
Me too, me too! This is a much happier way to live (minus the unceasing trips to get it trimmed). I submit that the only other successful hairstyle I can attempt is all on heads not my own.
My braid that I did this morning is currently crawling down my head and apart. My bangs have somehow become crimpy.
Yup. Sounds about right.
And this is why I have a pixie cut.
Me too! I gave up on non-existent hairstyles years ago. Now I don’t need to worry about how my hair slides out of all hairstyles. (Related: hair product now makes sense.)
Me too! Not a pixie cut, but a short bob. The closest I get to a “hairstyle” is putting on a headband OR maybe a wig. Wigs are the best.
Maybe it’s my hair texture but I can’t even put it into a basic ponytail without nearly losing a finger in an elastic incident. (Of course, I haven’t tried since I was 15 and cut it short.) But whenever I start to gain self-confidence and think of myself as belonging to the same species as women that I think are pretty, I see somebody putting their hair into a perfect bun just like, while sitting on the bus, without even looking, and then I remember that nope, I’m an awkward teen forever
HOW DO YOU BRAID YOUR OWN HAIR? LIKE ON THE BACK? HOW???
witchcraft -the only logical answer
My sister used to have waist-length hair and would spend like 30 minutes in the morning making 9 braids, then braiding them into 3 big braids, and then 1 big braid like some insane medieval princess. The extent of my hair skills is “put some goop in it (often too much or too little); rumple with fingers (usually get hand tangled); maybe do a little twist with the long bangs that floop out when they air dry and bobbypin?”
that sounds amazing and like maybe she now has dragons
Doing a French braid, I work on it till I get to the loose part, then I pull it up straight so that I can still reach it. Or I pull it to the side, but then it stays to the side.
You’re missing the important points: Holding three pieces of hair in your hands at the same time, separating those pieces from the rest of your hair that loves to stick together, moving your hands.
It really is a texture-specific ability, I imagine. My hair is curly, but it braids pretty well (moreso if it is wet or freshly brushed). Also I have big hands and long fingers, which make many things in life easier.
endlessly study youtube tutorials that tell you exactly what to do with your fingers.
It’s not really that hard: you separate it into three chunks, put one over your left shoulder, one over your right shoulder, and leave the one in the middle hanging down your back. That way you only have to manipulate two sections at a time and the other one can just hang out. The hard part is getting an even amount of hair in all three sections.
What hang out? Your hair just goes where you put it? It’s not a frizzy mess that insists on moving as a unit?
…yeah, I should mention that I am also of the Mallory-esque, can’t even keep a ponytail hair persuasion. That might have something to do with it.
Yes, sock buns are not real!! Thank you Mallory for speaking the truth!
I have a friend who uses sock buns all the time and she looks AMAZING. And it makes no sense.
Also I have curly hair so anything that involves wrapping or twisting is just gonna be a mess.
Jaya! I have curly hair! It can be done! Actually, I kind of prefer to sock bun when my hair is curly because then said bun is even bigger and has texture and it looks less like I am a prim ballerina and more like FUCK THE SOCK BUN HEGEMONY I WILL DO THIS THING AND MY HAIR WILL BE THE BIGGEST YOUVE EVER SEEN. That said, I know there are multiple techniques to making them, I go for the put the sock alllll the way at the tip and then roll it over. My hair is the knottiest and it actually comes out of the sock bun less knotty than when it went in. The more I type, the more I am realizing that hairstyles are witchcraft, much like Mallory said.
Oh they’re real. Real 2012! Snap.
I have (sort of?) a pixie cut right now because I had been growing my hair out “for my wedding” for ten years, shaved my head for a cancer-stricken friend last May and then immediately got engaged, and my hairdresser looked at me, took a deep breath and said “DON’T TOUCH IT UNTIL I TELL YOU AND I MIGHT BE ABLE TO STYLE IT HOW YOU WANT FOR THE WEDDING.” Until Sunday, when she finally consented to trim my bangs, I dutifully complied – and boy, a growing-out buzz cut sure does just do whatever the heck it wants. The first list seems like a dream to me now. (Not that I could accomplish any of those things when I had hair, of course. Me+second list = BFF).
Hats. Wedding hats. Look great with short hair!
Ooh! I have this 20s-looking headband I’m going with, but maybe I’ll cast around an eye for a hat in case I change my mind…. (I asked my mom about HER wedding hat, and she said “your dad hated it.” So maybe not hers.)
I once saw a funny wedding hat in JoAnn Fabrics and 12-year-old me pointed it out to my mom and was like, “Who would wear something so ugly to their wedding?” My mom said simply, “I had one like that.” I started to fall over myself to apologize and she darkly replied, “It wasn’t the only mistake I made that day.”
If I could shave off my hair without people assuming I had the big C, I would. The shedding! The weird things it will or won’t do at certain lengths! The fact that some days it will stay up and others I have crazy loose hairs sticking out all over my head and into my eyes! Static on cold dry days! UGH.
Shave it off anyway! I so admire women who do that. Would do it myself except I know for a fact how lumpy my head is and don’t want to show off that aspect of my badass self.
My mom’s an oncologist, and she shaved hers for St. Baldrick’s (a charity that hosts stunt head-shaving parties to raise money for children’s cancer research). She mentioned it being HILARIOUSLY weird to have colleagues come up to her and demand to know why they hadn’t heard about her condition.
My mum has a shaved head because she was in an accident and they had to remove and then replace part of her skull 4 months later but everyone who doesn’t know the actual story thinks she has cancer.
When I shaved my head it was because they were shaving people’s heads in the shopping centre and fundraising (is Shave for a Cure a thing anywhere but Australia?). I was trying to get rid of an unshakeable guy and shaving my head seemed like a good idea at the time, plus my hair was so heavily bleached it was like straw.
But I rocked the shaved look for ages and it’s really only asshats who feel the need to comment on a strangers hair and who cares about asshat opinions.
BETHOLOMEW. BUNCH OF GHOST DICKS. RIDER STRONG CIRCA 1998. BETHOLOMEW.
Well now I know what to name my firstborn daughter.
I’m thinking “Ghost Dicks” will illicit some snickers from fellow classmates… at first.
My darling little Betholomew Bunch of Ghost Dicks Rider Strong Circa 1998 Betholomew will NOT take that shit for a second.
I bought a round brush once. Those things are bullshit. What kind of wrist dexterity even makes them possible?
I used to get round brushes stuck in my hair all the time when I was younger and had longer hair. I don’t know why I kept trying.
WHY do they all come with that “ergonomic” gel or sticky/squishy handle? You know what I don’t need? Some rubberized section of my brush handle pulling my hair out while I try to maneuver it around my noggin.
I know. I just went through all of my brushes for blow drying and tossed all of the round, oval and paddle ones. (A stylist can use the round ones, because she is above and behind the head and can put the dryer under her arm and part the pieces she wants to do next. She’s at an advantage.) Then I went to Target and bought the “Wet Brush”. It’s a dream come true. I have hair down my back which has been over-processed since I was 5. I can take that brush and remove the snarls whether wet or dry.
I am always embarrassed when I get my hair cut and they ask my hair routine and I reply “Well I need a cut that looks good after I haphazardly blow dry it for 2 minutes, get hot, and let it air dry the rest of the way. You can give me a magical cut for that right? Oh and I don’t own any hair products, and use what ever shampoo is cheapest at Target. Thanks”
Still searching for that magical cut.
Yes! I blow dry my hair for 5 minutes max and then have to stop, shrug and just go to work.
Whenever I get a blowout, I marvel at the fact that the stylist blow-dries my shoulder-length hair for upwards of 45 minutes. I would never.
I say pretty muh the same thing… “What kind of product do you use in your hair?” (Serious red flag: anyone who uses “product” in the singular to refer to hair glop) “Uh…I wash it. Also conditioner.” I’ve learned not to mention that I tend to wash my hair with soap rather than shampoo!
God yes. The looks you get when you say “air dry.” Write in when you find this miraculous cut, I’m pretty sure Mallory’d give you column space.
I found that miraculous cut, and I am screwed if my hair lady ever decides to get a life, or take up particle physics, or move, or pretty much do anything besides take a lot of my hard earned dough and then make my curly, prematurely greying witch hair awesome (in ways that do not change the essential character of my prematurely greying witch hair but do keep it from eating small dogs).
I pretty much did that the first time I got My Style. “I need a cut that I can do nothing to and have it look okay. Like, “I have rolled out of bed and maybe showered and let it air dry.” “So, short and asymmetrical and stylishly unkempt?” “Sure!” “‘Kay.” Golden.
I have an angled bob, chin-length, or i DID until I stopped feeling up to paying $20 to the cheap place down the street once a month to keep it short. I’ve got hair like Mallory’s: fine and straight and hardly any volume, but a TON of it. And the bob looks pretty good even when I don’t use the blow-dryer EXCEPT for some bizarre reason, if it air dries, it will without fail look like I’m constantly windblown from the right. Like, the left side is ALWAYS curling out at the bottom and the right side is curling under. So I feel compelled to dry it for work, since I don’t wear makeup and I’m a receptionist.
Now that it’s growing out, I just wear it half-up with a barrette, which is fine, but since I let it air-dry by blasting the air vents on my car on the way to work, the half-down bits tend to look kind of stringy and sad after a couple hours. I’m looking forward to it being long enough to pull back with a hair claw again, if I can bear the growing out period (which, really, is more like a too-cheap-to-get-it-cut period, because I’d rather spend my $20 on stationery or books).
I want to do a side bun like Stromae in the Tous les Memes video but that’s a wig so it REALLY doesn’t exist.
I was aware of Stromae and that song, but not of that video, and I just want to thank you for bringing it into my life because HOT DAAAAAAAAMN that man is fine. *longing sigh*
Ha, I thought cutting my hair into a pixie would solve the “why can’t I do that hairstyle” problem and let me just wash and go like those carefree women in tampon commercials, but noooo. Curly hair + pixie + air drying = Jason Priestley’s hair from 90210. Which would be awesome if I were a hot guy in the ’90’s.
and THAT’s why I refuse to cut my hair. My mother is always “oh, it would be so much less work if you had short hair” but she spends WAY more time styling hers than i do on mine (of course, her hair is a different thickness and texture than mine, but still)
LADIES WITH SLIPPERY HAIR. So my younger cousins have hair just like that and they let me play with it and make it into fancy styles and one thing I found that helps is if you want something complicated to not slip out everywhere is to spray a little hairspray on the brush or spray it into your hand and sort of gently glide your hand down the sections you’re braiding. Or you can put a little styling lotion into your hair when it is still damp and then craft your style.
Also, dutch braids might be better than french braids for all of you with this hair type because it’s easier to disguise bobby pins tucked into the sides of the braid (pin them in bumpy side down, they stay put longer that way). You can also try something that looks good falling out, maybe like a Gibson girl thing? The claw could probably be incorporated into that.
As for making waves, spray your hair with water (they sell little misting bottles for like $1 at hair supply stores, they are also good for misting furniture and mattresses with vodka or vinegar to freshen them) and then braid it into 4-8 braids (depending on hair thickness) and tie them at the ends with one of those little clear elastics (they are stickier and smaller so they’ll stay put). If your hair is extra slippery put some styling lotion into it before you braid. Then go to sleep for 8 hours, wake up and unbraid the hair (if you’re worried you can flat iron the braids first, but it’s not really necessary if you’ve used the styling lotion) and it will be wavy! It might not last the whole day and into the night if your hair loses a curl fast, but it will be longer than just curling quickly with a curling iron, because you slept on it and let it finish drying in the braids.
Oh if you’re bad at braiding you might want to stick with two braids, one on each side of your head. French/dutch braids make it less likely for your hair to flap around but regular braids are easier. If braids are too hard you can put a bun on the top of your head I dream of jeannie style and then wrap the bun up with a scarf (to keep hair from being yanked out), that way the bun doesn’t actually touch your pillow when you sleep. As with the braids, using a styling lotion helps it last.
Guys, here is my foolproof Heidi braids tutorial!
1. Look up some instructions online that promise to be super easy and to take like 90 seconds to do.
2. Notice that the model’s braids are approximately the same thickness as my wrist.
3. Braid pigtails. (20 min.) Wonder if there are any rubber bands in the world small enough to secure the three strands of hair at the end of each braid.
4. Wrap braids over the top of head. Secure with bobby pins, ensuring that pins AND hair are now sticking out in all directions. Appear to be attempting a combover with a handful of hay.
5. Sigh. Unwind braids, taking care to break more than a few strands of hair.
6. Repeat several months later.
oh hey, I use the same method!
I tried to teach my sister how to do #8, which consisted of me demonstrating it about ten times and her saying “But how do you DO it?” and me saying “You just twist it and stick it until it feels right!” and five minutes of snickering, because we are both mentally 12.
I used to be able to French braid my own hair, the last time it was long enough. I’m currently growing it out, and hoping that French braids haven’t actually ceased to exist since then.
However, attempting to get it out of my way while it’s not quite long enough for a French braid have convinced me that the following styles are impossible to do to one’s own head: Two pigtail French braids, and that thing where the bangs are French braided sideways.
I’m growing out a pixie cut, which was too much work to keep trimmed and flatten down in the morning. I am assuming it will be less work once it’s long enough for a ponytail, but that’s probably just nostalgia lying to me.
Once you hit ponytail length, it’s easier to get out of the way, but you’re a bit stuck for options if you want to do anything Fance, as this article so amply demonstrates. I miss my short hair…
That’ll be ok, I never figured out anything fancy to do with it when it was short either.
Oh man. I’m so grateful for The Toast and you wonderful people. I used to read XOJane when I was young and impressionable and they had this whole Big Thing where the whole staff and contributors didn’t do anything to their hair for a whole day and somehow went about their lives without dying or being arrested. They posted picture of their hair looking like…..hair, and talked about their normal daily routines that included like five products and three different processes and I was like WHAT who are these people is everyone but me like this where did they all learn to be like this and why didn’t I?
Here is that post: http://www.xojane.com/beauty/gallery/undone-hair-…
Ahhh that post! I think they also did something like that with makeup once, where they didn’t wear it for a week and then were shocked when nothing horrible happened. I don’t mean to make light of people with whatever insecurities that make them do these things out of obligation rather than fun, but it also makes this toast article wildly refreshing.
Now I’ve clicked the xojane link and realized that my hair often looks like the ‘bad’ after photos. ~oops~ Except the difference is that people don’t point an laugh at me like they apparently do in the xo jane offices.
Hannah’s “scary mess” is basically my hair. I wash it every few days! I brush it every morning before I leave the house! I didn’t realise I was meant to be doing anything else. (I don’t even know what a “texturising product” is.)
That article is damn horrifying. As are the people saying that they look horrible, messes, like garbage, for having…hair……that is unbrushed……yeah, I wouldn’t like to go out with unbrushed hair, but…..WOW.
I still check xoJane regularly, but mostly only because of Lesley. I do read some of the articles by other people, but if they didn’t have Lesley I wouldn’t because I wouldn’t care enough to actually visit the site to see those articles.
I like The Toast so much better.
If you use an rss reader:
http://www.xojane.com/rss/author/lesley
Or otherwise http://www.xojane.com/author/lesley/allArticles
My life got much less annoying when I realized I didn’t have to wade through the whole rest of the site/the site feed for Lesley’s stuff.
Jesus Christ Phoebe, stop making that selfie face.
I HAVE GIVEN MYSELF NO LESS THAN SEVERAL 3RD DEGREE BURNS IN WHAT TURNED OUT TO BE PRETTY FUTILE EFFORTS TO BLOW-DRY MY HAIR.
on the plus side, having curly hair means i can go for whole hooouuuuurs without washing it!
#nobutreally #shutupdryshampoo #mistressofliiiieees
Somewhere Jane Marie is shedding a single perfect tear and she doesn’t know why.
I can do French braids on other people but not on myself. But now I just have a bob and my hair has two styles: “brushed” and “just walked in the wind.”
Also hahahahahahaha hairbrushes. You crazy people with straight hair.
YEP. Things I don’t own: hairbrush, flat iron, blow dryer, comb, headband, any hair accessory at all, really.
Haha, I was staying in a hotel room with a friend awhile ago and she forgot her hairbrush and we had this conversation:
Friend: “I forgot my brush, can I borrow yours?”
Me: ” i didn’t bring one”
Friend: “oh you forgot yours too?”
me: “nope…”
To be fair, I have only recently learned that hairbrushes are the devil for curly hair. I do have one that I do still use that has like 10 bristles spaced like an inch apart that i use to detangle my hair in the shower once in a blue moon, but that’s it.
I have curly hair but my daughter’s is so straight that neither of us brush. Hers falls into this perfect cornsilk thing once it’s washed and mine does it’s thing, and so we lose all the brushes pretty regularly.
She’s only 5 though, so sometimes we have to go hunting because we need to brush out the food before we wash…
I have short hair, which I cut myself. I could just cackle maniacally at this point because WOW am I glad I don’t have to deal with any of those 23 things, but instead allow me to enumerate the only states of my hair:
1. Totally perfect and swoony and amazing. Lasts five minutes, no living witnesses.
2. Giant cowlick. Sometimes with bonus cowlick.
3. You’ve been wearing a hat, huh?
4. Mysterious newscaster part. Just go ahead and start pointing out cold fronts. This is your life now.
“Mysterious newscaster part. Just go ahead and start pointing out cold fronts. This is your life now.”
Induced the perfect little giggle in me 😉
I am growing my hair out until my birthday as penance for something, I don’t know what really. I guess I was tired of looking good all the time, I don’t know. My last haircut, I tried to explain to my hair stylist who wanted to know what my end-stage goal was that my end-stage goal was having an old-timey men’s haircut with tightly shaven sides tapering up to a very mild tousledness on top, just like I started with, but for now I just wanted to let it grow out until it looks incredibly terrible and feels unbearable in the middle of the mid-Atlantic summer so I can cut it all off again, like a phoenix growing out its feathers until it looks like an idiot before setting itself on fire. she did not really understand me. I don’t really understand me.
I understand this 100% completely.
Also: Pinterest is the DEVIL. Just….the devil. Also, fake and made up, every hair pin on there.
You need at least a little bit of coarseness to get a pencil to stay in, so if you can’t even keep a ponytail, that’s the problem. It’s also best if it hasn’t just been brushed. Here’s how I do it:
1. Use a pen instead.
2. Hold the pen by the clicky end in one hand and your hair in the other.
3. Wrap your hair under the pen and then around it once, twisting just a little. Keep the pen in place.
4. Now keep your hair in place and tilt the pen vertically so that the tip is pointing up.
5. Invert the pen by rotating the clicky end away from your head.
6. Your hair hand should have traveled down to the end of your hair by this point, but don’t let go until the pen is securely in place.
7. Expect a few failed initial attempts.
Alternate version (that actually works on my like-silk, slippery, fine (albeit abundant) hair):
DAMMIT. I HAD THIS WRITTEN OUT THEN REALIZED I HADN’T LOGGED IN.
Sigh. Let me see if I can muster the energy again later this afternoon.
My hair gets brushed by my stylist twice a year when I get it cut. My hair gets washed and combed out every three weeks when I touch up the roots. My hair is lucky to get finger-combed twice a week, or whenever I can be bothered. This morning I got out of bed, wrapped my hair up in a Turbie Twist (those things are the bomb, NGL), showered, shook my hair out, and got dressed. When I don’t have to worry about my hair freezing on the way to work, the only difference is I rinse it out, then wrap it up in the Turbie Twist while I get ready. Then I shake it out and leave the house. I don’t do SHIT with my hair and I get compliments on it ALL THE TIME. Yeah, I’m lucky to have thick, wavy-ish hair, but I can’t evangelize enough about the miraculous potential of treating your hair with an attitude of benign neglect.
I’m very lucky with my hair too. I wash it about every other day, and brush it when it looks weird, and that’s it.
Fuck, yeah. *solidarity fist bump*
Some sort of magic happened to my head this morning and allowed me to get all of my hair into a ponytail with no weird bumps on top or rogue straggly bits sliding out onto my neck, and with the elastic in that elusive sweet spot between way too loose and slippy and painfully tight and headache-inducing. This magic ponytail also remained intact, despite the humidity, through my bike ride to work without a bunch of little tendrils creeping free and sticking straight out from the sides of my head, making me look like an unattractive human-axolotl hybrid. I was feeling kind of proud, and then this list reminded me of the reality that is every other day of my existence besides this one. Thank you for keeping me from the fatal mistake of hair hubris.
Actual, legitimate wheezing happening over here. Claw things are the only way my hair doesn’t look the exact same every day.
I cut the vast majority of my hair off when I realized that my hair routine every morning consisted of 1) wash 2) dry 3) straighten (my hair is about 95% straight but has exactly one wave that occurs at around ear length. Also, naturally curly front-of-ear-tendrils) only to 4) put in a low ponytail because I hate the feeling of having hair around my face.
I am bad at caring about my hair. Also, I have to wash it every day. I am so envious of you dry-haired goddesses – my hair is so greasy after about 12 hours that it starts to separate into chunks. Looking back on pictures of myself from elementary school, it is amazingly apparent which days I had freshly washed hair vs. second day hair.
THE WAVE.
THE WAAAAAAAVE.
*frowny face.*
I KNOW THE WAVE.
I taught myself how to French braid my own hair. *INSUFFERABLY SMUG* But then I cut it all off. Cut it all off, you guys! You don’t have to do any Hair Work in the morning, plus it cuts way down on the number of terrible dudes who try to speak to you.
Curling your own hair at the back. HOW DO YOU DO IT?
I have mostly figured out how to curl with a straightener, and it looks nice. I think? But the back, it will forever elude me.
All hair advice that isn’t “idk just don’t brush it” is garbage. Trust no one.
I agree with this list in its entirety*, but it is even worse when you have fine thin baby hair and are forced to do something with it so you don’t look like an actual infant. But I have discovered root volumizer spray and a quick upside down blow dry is about all I can manage. Any more and I look like a grease monkey. Also, cowlicks! WHY!?
*Except dry shampoo lets me just washing my hair every other day, it doesn’t even approaching “cleaning,” it’s really just absorbing oil.
…I feel a deep emotional need to buy you some hot rollers.
You seem to be under the false assumption that it is possible to get hot rollers in your hair. I promise you it is not. Anything else you have been told is lies and deceit from the mouth of a three-eyed witch.
Hot rollers. The best hair invention.
This is exactly my life. My hair does one thing: it is straight. It gets washed, it gets blown dry upside-down (not with a fancy brush or anything, because there lies tangles and nightmares), and then we get on with our lives. My hair takes four minutes to do in the morning, and I do it while the coffee brews, and when the coffee is done brewing, so is my hair. If my hair doesn’t think it is done brewing then, it is wrong, because the coffee is done and so is my hair.
Pony tails are impossible. Buns with chopsticks are possible, but not in such a way that we can wear it out.
This is 100% accurate. This is the most accurate thing I have ever read on The Toast. This is certainly more accurate than anything positive that has ever been written here about Bangalore Curmudgeon.
1. When I was eight, my platonic ideal of beauty was a girl with a high ponytail and nail polish.
2. One time at writing camp, a guy tried to braid my hair in a fishtail, and he was very proud of it in a bro-y way, and it looked horrible. I thought it was vaguely flirtatious in a weird way, but was in fact wrong because later that summer he would go on to date one of my best friends and then hurt her. Turns out he was an asshole.
3. Women with very thick hair: WHAT DO YOU DO except pull it back in a ponytail?
When I’m cooking or painting or doing anything where my hair needs to be out of the way, I put it up with a hairstick in a bun. The rest of the time that shit just rests on my head in a gorgeous, wavy mess. I swear to you, if you have thicky, wavy hair and you just leave it alone, it will do amazing things for you. I highly recommend the book Curly Girl. It changed me life, seriously.
Honestly, my go-to is a messy bun. BUT that doesn’t work if I want to be able to put my head flat against anything (like a headrest or a yoga mat), in which case I usually turn to French-braided pigtails. I like the way it looks down, but I play with it a lot when I do that. I also like the way it looks with a bandana/kerchief over it either down or in pigtails, but the bandana always slides off my head within 10 minutes.
My fave was spin pins, into a low side bun. Followed by crown braids to distribute weight. But I did love the partially shaved bit because it lessened the weight a lot and made it easier to deal with.
Mind you, this is my hair during the ‘so fucking long what the hell it’s caught in my armpit’ era.
http://instagram.com/p/fdnvOSkppY/
I recently walked out of the bathroom to be greeted by my husband saying, “So we’re going for the full Hermione today, are we?”
For a moment I was offended, but then I said, “Yes, yes I am.”
HFL
Blowdrying my hair either gets me Hermione or Whitesnake.
Hermione is preferable.
Whitesnake is the reason I don’t have bangs no matter what the stylists say. I will never look like Zooey Deschanel and it will all end badly.
I do a thing where I do french-braided pigtails and then tie the loose parts into a knot at the back of my head. It looks very fancy.
And I have also done the Heidi braids, which require bobby pins.
The secret to the “pencil instead of hairsticks” trick is a) use two (pens work as well) and b) you probably have to redo it a few times. This is a look I mostly use when I am about to cook and can’t find a hair tie.
I can also do a fishtail, though only if I swing it to the side (otherwise my arms get tired) and it doesn’t stay all day.
BUT I don’t know how to use a blow dryer.
“If your hair already comes pre-curled, then congratulations, you have a hairstyle.”
HAHAHA no. You either have something that says “I have nothing better to do than spend two hours on my hair to make it look marginally presentable” or something that says “I brushed my hair with a tornado funnel cloud.”
As someone with very curly hair, I can attest that there is no medium between these two.
But how do you have a high ponytail without getting a huge headache later, is my question. The answer is that you don’t. High ponytails equal literal headaches.
I think the headache is at least partially psychosomatic for me; I always associate flawless high ponytails with the supersnob elite of my high school days, and my hair rejects being made to conform.
Just upvoting everyone here. I really really want to understand braiding, especially how to do it on my own hair, but cannot for the life of me make sense of it.
The way I learned to braid hair was making a metric buttload of braided bracelets as a kid, and then eventually realizing I could also do that to my hair. So…..maybe practice with some rope or string or something?
I finally managed to produce some kind of crude, proto french-braid with my hair, and it lasted all day! Unfortunately, halfway down my head it degenerated into what can only charitably be described as some sort of matted beaver-tail, but it’s the “finally not wearing a claw clip” that counts, right.
The OED announces their new additions this month:
scroonch
flooshooping
frunge
These words immediately entered the lexicon after renowned author Mallory Ortberg bestowed them upon the world to describe hair manipulation and the difficulty thereof on the cult-favorite website The Toast.
Seriously, #21…how is it done? Sorcery!
Also, I just love this entire list because it’s all true, especially concerning bobby pins. Sure, they appear cooperative, lying there in clumps of twos and threes under the totally useless “paddle brush” that one stylist convinced you to buy because you were tired, so, so tired of trying to tame your coarse fuzzy locks that you spent 40.00 bucks on a fucking hairbrush that your hair outright and maliciously rejected.
Whoops, what was I saying about accursed bobby pins? Oh yeah, they hang around in your head for like 5 minutes before saying “later, loser”, sliding off never to be seen again.
HA one of my rare and mostly useless skills is braiding. In fact, while reading this article, I thought “man, heidi braids can’t be that hard, can they?” and then I produced them on my head while reading the comments. Am I fired from witch-dom or what?
how do you do it?? do you braid with your head upside down? don’t you get the ugly side of the braid if you braid it in the normal direction and then flip it over your head???
Haha I don’t even know how to explain, which is why I will never be an internet hair goddess. I center-parted it, then french braided each side around to where they met in the back. From there, I switched to regular braiding and then pinned each braid in where they ended, which for me was right around the front of my head where the french braid started (so I could tuck the little ends in under the beginning of the french braid).
Ugh, center parting….when you’re french braiding on the side of your head, where do you get enough hair on the side closest to your ear from? Or is it a sort of one-sided french braid?
also the divide in the comments who claim to be and don’t claim to be “witches” is really hilarious to me, everyone uses it to mean something different. 😀
Ah, I have SO much hair. I have enough hair for many humans. My french braid is about an inch up from my ear and that’s enough for a pretty decently thick braid. #witchlife
in theory, you could braid the pigtails as though you were braiding someone else’s hair. That is, when I braid pigtails on my head, I sort of do them from the underside, so that they look like the were braided by someone else. BUT I can also do it where the part that goes over is the part closer to my head, though that is harder because I have to go against muscle memory.
When I do Heidi braids, I just do two regular pigtails (not french) and then pull them up over the crown of my head. My hair is long enough that this results in being able to tuck the end of one under the base of the other. Then I pin them to each other and to the hair on my scalp. I haven’t done it in years, though, because they aren’t really compatible with the over-ear headphones I wear on my commute.
Right? I’m a little bit bewildered by all of the comments here. You just put one strand over the other strand a few times and voila, french braids. Did no one here ever go to a sleepover? How have so many of you missed out on this important life skill?
(Full disclosure: I have two little sisters so I likely have had far more practice than most.)
French braiding is really ALL about practice. So I totally get the confuzzled if people are just trying one time. It’s like “violins! How are they played?! Nobody could ever possibly play a violin!” except that braiding is supposed to be just inborn to women.
My mother was not good at braiding, and the girls I was friends with were not the kind who played with/braided each other’s hair, so I taught myself. And my hands basically always have to be doing something, so often times that something is playing with/braiding my hair, which is how I have figured out most of the cool things I know how to do – just idly fooling around.
I have very thick hair and have had a lifetime of very deep hair laziness, sometimes papered over with bouts of VELCRO ROLLERS and STRAIGHTENING IRONS and HOT ROLLERS and other such things. I’ve had some success with each of those things and still use them on occasion, but really since I discovered in college that my hair was naturally curly (yes, college, I didn’t notice before because of my rich inner life), I have spent most of my time either washing/air drying or going the bun/ponytail route when it was long enough.
I’ve never washed or even brushed my hair every day (see above re: deep laziness), but right now I’m in the process of giving up shampoo and am in the horrible middle stage where I’m not allowed to use anything but water on my hair. Apparently this will eventually make me a natural hair goddess? Right now I feel like I start out ok in the morning but my hair looks like ramen noodles by lunchtime. Did someone say PONYTAIL?
If I remember correctly, my nothing-but-water stage last just barely two weeks (out of three or four I had planned on) before I gave up and started using the baking soda and vinegar solutions. My hair didn’t fall out, so you should be fine cutting that stage short.
There needs to be a “styles for awkward hair lengths” category in every fashion magazine, they all seem to go straight from “adorable Rihanna pixie-cut” to “massive chunky waves suitable for long braids and elaborate structural buns.” Someone could make millions exploiting that middle ground.
heh, “structural buns.”
Yes! My hair is collarbone-length (plus or minus a bit depending on how long ago I cut it), and don’t get me wrong, it’s the perfect length for me. Much longer and it’s too much to deal with, any shorter and it’s a frizzy triangular mess. But whenever I look up hairstyle things I always have to spend so much time just trying to figure out if and how I can finagle a version of whatever cool tutorial I find that actually works.
Yes to almost all of this list! Except that claw clips are also imaginary: any time I’ve tried to use them, I’ve ended up having my hair slip through the clip, and I’m holding an empty claw clip like a sucker. (So relieved to have a pixie cut now.)
Weirdly, I did manage to braid my own hair for a while, when I was a long-haired teenager, and I would take the braid, fold it like a pretzel, and pin the crap out of it with large bobby pins. I can’t recreate it now. Is it possible that I was briefly a witch, during my teen years?
ALSO. Someone upthread whose comment I can no longer find said a thing about putting bobby pins in bumpy side down, but is this a fine/straight-haired thing? Because in my curly hair it’s agony and I don’t find they stay any better.
I’ve got pretty wavy hair, and it helps me!
I MUST be doing it wrong with my giant sausage fingers, because I mostly find that I’m painfully aware of the pins and I end up losing some hair when I take them out. Sharone: failing at bobby pins since the 80s.
I think I was the person that said this. I have fine but thick and wavy hair however, I learned the bobby pin trick from using my cousins as my own personal life size barbies and they have super fine super straight and super slippery hair and it works for them. You can also gently mist the bobby pin (but not your hair) with hairspray before popping it in, that can help it stick if you’re wearing an updo for hours and hours and hours (like, I did this when I did my cousin’s hair for prom so she could dance without everything sliding off her head).
I should try this with the hairspray. My hair’s pretty thick so I don’t have a problem with pins staying in for fancy updo type things, but I don’t do those very often. Mostly I’m trying to keep the front pieces from falling out of ponytails and buns at the sides, where my hair’s thinner when I pull it back. This might do the trick!
Are you talking about the whispy bits that stand out? What helps with those is to spray a little hairspray on your hand and then just smooth your hands along the sides of your hair. I normally don’t like hairspray but it’s great for this sort of thing
Not just wispy bits (although sometimes those, when they’re particularly obnoxious), mainly the front pieces that have the longest distance to go to get to the elastic and tend to get saggy and sometimes fall out over the course of the day.
I admit that I am a fine/straight haired person, but the “spin pin” is magical and the only one that will reliably both stay in and also come out when I want it to.
I am usually pretty happy with my hair (because it is wavy and falls into the category Mallory describes as “congratulations, you have a hairstyle”).
For years (and by “years” I mean decades, and by “decades,” I mean since the night that 19-year-old me got fed up with the hair tumbling down to the middle of her back, took out a pair of scissors, cut the right-hand side at the chin, then came out of the bathroom crying because I couldn’t get it straight across the back so my roommate-partner-whatever poured me a gimlet and cut the rest), I’ve been wearing my hair in a bob just above the chin. It works. I barely have to do anything to it, and as long as I get it cut, it looks quite presentable, sometimes very pretty. But it is is: there are no options.
But then I remembered all those long ringlets and curls and waves and putting hair in a ponytail and twisting it up with a pencil and wrapping it into one long twist and pinning that twist up in a fancy barrette.
You see where this is going, right? I started growing it out. It grows wickedly fast, so it’s already to my shoulders, and it looks … fine. Unremarkable. Right now it’s at that stage where it’s juuuuuuust too short to pin up or pull back in a single ponytail.
AND IT TOUCHES MY NECK OH NO CONSTANTLY
It is always on my neck, laying against my neck, touching my neck, tickling and stroking and poking at my neck OH MY NECK HALP
Maybe try French braiding? I find I can French braid my hair a little before I can put it in a ponytail, when I’m growing it out.
And then you can do the thing where you tuck the loose bit of the braid under the not-loose bit and pin it in place and then your hair doesn’t touch your neck at all, which is nice.
Of course, this does require learning to French braid.
I have the kind of wavy-to-frizzy layered hair that resists a French braid, also, as Mallory mentioned, French braids do not exist. But yes (and thank you for the suggestion, it’s a good one) I am alllllmost to the point where I can pull and twist the shorter bits into the longer bits to pin it up.
But
A. that alllllmost keeps stretching out, and in the meantime I don’t know if I mentioned but MY NECK AAAAAAH MY NECK
B. I am starting to wonder why I am growing it out at all if it’s going to mean constantly pulling or pinning it up to get it off MY NECK AAAAAAAH MY NECK.
This thing, where you basically tuck your ponytail into itself and then pin it, might work? http://www.beautylish.com/a/vpyia/gibson-tuck-hai…
I’ve only managed to do it, like, twice on myself properly, but it’s super cute and doesn’t hurt your head the way other styles that keep your hair off your neck do.
I know people who can do like all of these hairstyles themselves.
The only mildly anything hairstyle I can do is the one where you grab your bang-pieces and twist them back towards your scalp, moving around the side of your head as you go. Then you pin the end of the twist to the side of your head and viola.
I figured out how to do it when I was out hiking one day and it was like I’d found a cure for cancer.
Yeah as the owner of a fuckload of fine silky not-quite-straight hair, all of these sound about right. Low pigtails are my general solution if I need to make it stop being everywhere, even though they make me look like I’m 5 — it won’t stay in much else.
My main secret re: getting it straight-ish is to stick it in a towel for at least 30 minutes before I try to blow-dry it. I look ridiculous, but it gets enough moisture out that if I brush it out while drying it, it mostly goes in directions that make sense.
your problem is you’re washing your hair, Mallory. why can’t you just be gross, and then: buns and high ponytails galore!
True. Clean hair is much more difficult to style. If you insist on washing your hair every day (which you really, really shouldn’t do,) then spritz in some saltwater to give it some styling hold.
FRUNGE
SNACKLE
that’s all.
OMG, GHOST DICKS. I AM DYING.
also, all of this is true.
I can french braid and I can dutch braid and I can put my hair in a claw cage and I can SOMETIMES when my hair is VERY LONG I can twist it up and around a pencil and get it to stay up there. But the weather has to be perfect and nobody can breathe near me while I put it up.
Everything else is nonsense and magic. My hair is straight and smooth and does not hold a curl but it’s the GREATEST at holding ponytail-holder-dents indefinitely until it gets wet. Actually not just ponytail holder dents but anything that is accidental. If I fall asleep on the side of my face and it dries sort of up and smashed into the side of my head from where I was lying unconscious against a pillow or blanket or heavy tome then it stays there forever but I can’t MAKE IT do anything. It does what it wants.
Also heidi braids are the greatest scandal of hair lore because to make a heidi braid as thick as they are in all the pictures and on all the celebrities I would have to use ALL OF MY HAIR so like… how much hair does one have to have to have a glorious thick heidi braid AND ALSO HAIR CASCADING DOWN THEIR BACK? That’s voodoo. It’s cheating and I won’t stand for it.
This is only semi-witchy but you can weave fake hair into your dutch braid to make a super thick heidi braid.
I believe that counts as “cheating.” Surely bringing in hair help is like taking PEDs in the hair Olympics.
What if you cut the extra hair off the head of your mortal enemies?
…
I thought women got taught how to take care of their hair by their mothers.
I mean, boys usually start pretending their mothers have nothing relevant to tell them around fourteen, but I thought that was when that whole shared bowl of femininity and period cramps began for girls. Then they get taught makeup and those shiny fingernail things and how to pretend boys don’t freak them out.
“Don’t you love this time of the evening, Mr. Wooster, when the sun has gone to bed and all the bunnies come out to have their little suppers? When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy queen.”
Indicating with a reserved gesture that this was just the sort of loony thing I should have expected her to think as a child, I returned to the point.
Even if your mother teaches you everything she knows about hair, it doesn’t necessarily translate from one head of hair to the next.
My mother had stick-straight hair that she hated, so she was utterly unprepared to do anything with my tangle of curls but drag a comb through it until I cried and cut it short when I wanted it long (because less hair = less untangling = fewer tears, except for the tears I cried over having my hair all chopped off in a bowl-cut the night before picture day).
“Mothers teach their daughters” only works if daughters have mothers, if those mothers have both spare time and interest in teaching hairstyles, if mothers know anything about hairstyling themselves, and if their daughters have the same kind of hair and the same style sensibilities. That’s a lot of ifs.
Almost everything I learned about hair and make-up and clothing, I learned from a peer group or on my own. When Mallory wrote about the excitement over Monica Kowalski’s big makeup kit, I promise you that several of us (who never knew Monica Kowalski but had our own Monica Kowalski) gasped in mixed nostalgia and excitement.
In theory, this is true, but this assumes that a) your mother has hair similar to you and b) knows how to do things with it. My hair more closely resembles my father’s than my mother’s, and my whole life she has either had a perm or short hair, so I had to figure out a lot of what to do with my hair on my own.
We don’t have magical moon-circles where the secrets of femininity are passed down from mother to daughter; we’re not Freemasons.
My mom has always been kind of butch, with short, wash-and-go hair. She never allowed me to grow mine long until I was “old enough to take care of it [my]self,” because she had no interest in brushing, styling, braiding, etc. When, as a teenager, I grew my hair longer and started wearing makeup, she sent me to a series of makeover/how-to-be-a-girl classes at the community centre. Actually, she put me through TWO of these series, at two different community centres (we moved when I was 14), because I had apparently not learned the right things the first time. I think she wanted me to learn this stuff “properly” (i.e. from an adult) but couldn’t/didn’t want to teach me herself. Anyways, it didn’t work; I’m still pretty hopeless at that stuff.
For many years my go-to style was twin braids on the side of my head, in the style of… well, take your pick really. Wendy the hamburger girl, or Pipi Longstocking, or Anne Shirley, or my mom in the 60’s. It was great.
Then I hit that awkward age where I couldn’t get away with it anymore without taking a really hard line approach to the rest of my appearance. Like, once you hit 25 or so, twin braids are A Look which must be supported with Funky Individualistic Fashion which makes A Statement, and I just didn’t care enough.
I spent a good decade trying out different styles and products and what-have-you and it stunk. Now I rock a bob and bangs, which is awesome because I never have to decide what to do with it. And a nice Aussie on youtube showed me how to blow it dry in 3 minutes and it works every time and strangers regularly compliment my head.
I spent most of my thirties with two braided pigtails. It was okay, I was a grad student, and therefore quirky by definition.
even though this post is filed under ‘beauty’ i am personally going to think of it as ‘misandry’ related
Buzz cut is the best thing I ever did in my life.
There aren’t many times that I’m thankful to have alopecia but one of them is when I can take my wig off, style it, and leave it for the night knowing that it will still look the same in the morning. Also not having hair makes me inexplicably cool every night. I pile all the blankets on and sleep in a glorious nest. Hair is so weird.
I once had hair down to my butt and wore it in hair buns held with sticks. If I put the bun low on my head it would stay and I wouldn’t get a hair headache for at least eight hours or so. Then I could undo it and have fabulous “bun waves”. The hair-styling was easy-peasy after the initial learning curve. The hard part was cleaning the hair out of the vacuum cleaner brush. Oh. My. God. I am not sure I can stand to ever have long hair again.
I read this five hours ago and I still can’t get over how funny I think “ghost dicks” is
the worst bit is when you decide that yes, today i am going to learn how to make a bun, it’ll be fine, other people do this literally everyday of their lives and i’m quite clever so this should be easy. so you google it and wikihow comes up (it always comes up) and you begin to read the instructions and follow along, and then you realise your fingers are too fat and your hair isn’t right for making buns anyway and like, who can even read these instructions they are ridiculous, obviously you’d need a fourth and fifth arm to do it and yet here you am with only two useless arms this is just bullshit fuck it. then you order chinese takeout and drink wine.
I have Hair that Requires Attention, so can actually manage several items on this list! I fail at most other girly shit, so I’m sort of absurdly pleased by this.
The pencil/bun thing — in order to do this, you need hair that hits your back around your shoulder blades/bra strap. Shorter won’t work, sorry.
1.) Hold your hair in your left hand as though you were going to put it in a low ponytail.
2.) Take your pencil or other stick like object in your right hand.
3.) Position the pencil under your hair (which is still in your left hand) with the pointy end at roughly 7’clock (pointing towards your left shoulder) and the eraser end at 1 o’clock
4.) Still holding your hair with your left hand, and holding your pencil at the eraser end, rotate it clockwise almost 360 degrees — so the pointy end is at 5 o’clock, pointing to your right shoulder.
5.) take a deep breath, you’re almost there.
6.) rotate your stick another 180 degrees, so the pointy end is at 11 o’clock.
7.) ok, this is the tricky part, because we’re going from working in two dimensions to three: keeping your hair in your left hand, take the eraser end of your pencil and pivot it out/away from your skull. Flip it to 11 o’clock and, with the pointy end, push (stab) right through the knot of hair you’ve created. Push your pencil through the bun. You are done.
If your hair is long, you might have to rotate the pencil a couple more times. If you are lefthanded, well, you’re on your own.
Hairstyles I can do:
1. A not-very-good ponytail.
2. Pulling the front sections of either side back and securing behind my head in some fashion. (NB: This always takes much longer than I think it will and my arms get tired.)
That’s it.
(It might be easier, I suppose, if I ever used things like a hairdryer or hair products (spray? Serum? Gel? I don’t know what these things are) or a hairdresser. But it’s all too much effort.)
CUT IT OFF NEVER WASH IT NEVER GO BACK
I have gotten both a job and married while using this hair strategy so I can assure you that it is an acceptable thing
I have the straightest hair in the history of all hair. Putting it into anything other than its natural state is out of the question. Right now (despite my being 50 years old), it’s purple because I decided if it won’t have a style, it can at least for God’s sake be colorful. I once went to a new hairstylist and told him he could do whatever he wanted, “but I’m telling you right now that it won’t style or curl.” He cut it, and then proceeded to try and style it with a brush and blow dryer. A look of panic came over his face. He got out a curling iron. He curled and curled. Nothing. I went home looking as close to a soccer mom as someone with 23 tattoos can look. I went into my bathroom. I looked in the mirror. I sighed…and shaved it off into a mohawk.
My hair’s wavy, but it’s fine and slippery as heck. It will hold any style for about a minute or until somebody breathes. When longish (it never gets much past my shoulders), it’s completely flat on top and scraggly at the sides/back. When short, it does this poofy Republican Wife thing. So, like you, I have chosen a funky colour as a stand-in for style, and I am now wearing it short and purple. Yay us!
You forgot the thing with the pencil and the floppy ends that keeps your neck from sweating quite as much.
Also impossible: That thing where you gel your hair and slick it back and it looks wet and sleek. Because when you try this, it just looks like you put too much gel in your hair and it’s crunchy and flat with random cowlicks that still somehow stick out.
I had one of those curling-iron-brush things once. Literally once. The first time I tried to use it, it became hopelessly tangled in my hair — that was on the very first stroke — and had to be removed with scissors. Perhaps more accurately, my hair had to be removed from my head with scissors; the hair and the electric monster remained together happily ever after. Assholes.
As a hair stylist I found this article hillarious. I can do nearly everyone of those styles on my own hair lol. However, I’ve been taught and have had many years of practice, not only on my own hair but on other people’s hair. French braiding your own hair may be difficult if you don’t know how to do it but the fish tail braid is honestly the MOST basic braid and is extremely easyto achieve.
“They just…slide down and out, like a drunk friend who doesn’t want to keep walking.”
Perfection.
Also, ghost dicks!
Falling out in clumps was less weird than having my mom use a lint roller on my head. That is a thing you can do with your non-hair! Use a lint roller on it.
I’m so glad I am not the only one who consistently fails at hair.
When my hair was long it had two styles: messy bun, or messy braids.
Now it’s short and has two styles: the one where I attempted to make it stick up in the morning, and the one where I tried to comb t flat in the morning. It doesn’t matter which one I do, it always looks the same by lunch time.
My mom has always been kind of butch, with short, wash-and-go hair. She never allowed me to grow mine long until I was "old enough to take care of it [my]self," because she had no interest in brushing, styling, braiding, etc. When, as a teenager, I grew my hair longer and started wearing makeup, she sent me to a series of makeover/how-to-be-a-girl classes at the community centre. Actually, she put me through TWO of these series, at two different community centres (we moved when I was 14), because I had apparently not learned the right things the first time. I think she wanted me to learn this stuff "properly" (i.e. from an adult) but couldn't/didn't want to teach me herself. Anyways, it didn't work; I'm still pretty hopeless at that stuff.
My hair's wavy, but it's fine and slippery as heck. It will hold any style for about a minute or until somebody breathes. When longish (it never gets much past my shoulders), it's completely flat on top and scraggly at the sides/back. When short, it does this poofy Republican Wife thing. So, like you, I have chosen a funky colour as a stand-in for style, and I am now wearing it short and purple. Yay us!
This fucking article. It is perfect. I can’t do any of these things either, except the pencil thing. Which doesn’t help anymore since the other 22 things drove me so nuts that I cut almost all of it off.
How about that Roman hairdo that took 2000 years for someone to replicate http://www.livescience.com/26112-oldest-roman-hai…
This article, ever word is a hundred percent true.
this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen and all you ever post is amazing
it’s like you’re singing to me my life
and my life is nothing but terrible sad hair stories
how do they do the hair? HOW?
I got a Pixie cut 5 months ago and this conversation is making me afraid that I will lose the ability to braid my own hair now that I can't do it any more. I'm sitting here at my desk making motions of moving phantom hair around behind my head.
I am eagerly subscribing to the “ghost dicks” tag, FYI.
Nope,Trapping Your Hair In A Claw Cage DOES NOT EXIST. What does exist is slapping a headband on either wet or dry hair.
I know this is very old but I re-read this and now I’m crying with laughter but I’m in a cafe so I’m doing it silently, which is possibly more disturbing than just laughing.
I’m also wearing a beanie, in lieu of washing my hair, so. Y’know. This is truth-talk, right here.