Hair trial

I have one local bridesmaid. In fact, she's so local that she lives just up the hallway from me, which is really pretty great, because planning a wedding while in college and far away from everyone else involved sometimes leaves me feeling pretty despondent and isolated. She helps keep me from feeling that way.

Yesterday at lunch with a friend, I was mentioning my ideas for hairstyles on the bridesmaids. She offered to let me experiment with her hair. The idea struck me as an excellent one, so I emailed O'Molly (my local bridesmaid, who is Irish, and so I will make jokes about her name) and invited her over to my room for a hair trial. The aforementioned friend actually wasn't able to make it until after I'd got ready for bed, so we decided to reschedule.

What I find particularly satisfying about last night's hair trial was that she showed up with clean, dry (very slippery) hair, and none of the styles we tried took more than a few spritzes of styling wax, a brush, and a handful of bobby pins. Also, none of them took me more than ten minutes at most, including deliberation about what to try.

I didn't document each step of styling, but I did document most of the results, so I can try and recreate things again later. I did not reference any guides while doing the styling, but before she stopped by, I spent about an hour reading the Bobby Pin Blog, and looking at hairstyling instructional videos on YouTube.

All pictures are by me, with awful quality because it was nighttime in a basement dorm room, and my camera is old, and I hate using the flash.

So, first we tried some very traditional-looking victory rolls. I loved these, but O'Molly was less than impressed. Also, they could have been a lot higher, but her hair, as I mentioned before, is slippery, and it took me a while to get used to working with it/get enough wax in it to make it do what I wanted. Please note that awesome red lipstick. It, along with some sort of vintage hairstyle, will probably be a requirement.


O'Molly decided that red lipstick and the awesome swing music we were listening to still weren't quite enough to set the mood, so she went and changed into a fancy-schmancy dress. She thought it would be fun. I agree. It was.


We tried the victory rolls in front with the rest of the hair down. Can we say bombshell? This might be my favorite of everything we attempted.

Next we tried what is actually a modification of the way my mom styles her hair. I love the way this looked in back, although we had to use a hair band to hold the front in place. For the actual wedding, I think I would use a clip.



Just for fun, I tried out a pompadour with a scarf, which is more rockabilly than our wedding will be, but still hilarious. I thought she looked super cute like this, but I think she thought it was a little ridiculous.


And last, but not least, we tried a made-up style that combined elements of the rest, and then completed the look with a hair flower. I made that thing myself, y'all! I plan to make several more--one for each bridesmaid, with a different flower for each girl. That one took me about 15 minutes, which is an amount of work totally out of proportion to how great it looks.



We were big, big fans of the flower.

After that, O'Molly had to go to work, so I had to resort to playing with my own hair. I post this partly so O'Molly won't feel totally singled out with this entry, and partly because Dave suggested that he wouldn't mind if I started wearing my hair and makeup like this every day.



What do you think? Is the rockabilly/1950's/Rosie the Riveter look for me? And which of O'Molly's hairstyles did you like the best?