I’m sure you’ve heard me say it many times before but I love the glamour of the 40s and 50s and even though my wardrobe of vintage dresses and cute swing dancing shoes is gradually growing, the one thing that I’ve not yet been able to achieve is the hair styles from this era. I’ve watched some fab videos on YouTube to learn how to do the victory rolls of the 40s and have tried time and again to get the polished Hollywood glamour look of the 50s but my style always seems to fall flat within a very short space of time.
I usually try out my vintage hairstyles when I’m heading out to a hangar dance or a nostalgia show and the limited amount of time I have to get ready, coupled with my general hair-styling incompetence, means that although I can sometimes leave the house with a passable hair do, by the time I’ve been flung around the dancefloor a couple of times my hair is flat again. Which is really unfair because my hair is naturally wavy! I have no idea how it manages to ends up so straight and lifeless – if I wanted it to be straight it would kink up immediately – but the minute I want to look glamorous and polished, my hair decides that it has other plans and wants to slob out instead.
So here’s the point of my blog post today – I’ve just finished trying out my new silk rollers for the first time and I wanted to share my experience with you, along with a couple of photos to give you an idea of what look can be achieved with my new Remington heated rollers (available from Very.co.uk or Amazon). I tried a tentative curl the night before and that seemed to stay fairly well without any hair spray so I decided to give it a go all over and see what happened.
As a complete roller novice, I wasn’t sure what to expect and wondered how I could be sure of the finished result if I couldn’t really see what I was doing. But nonetheless I plugged in the unit to start heating up and read through the comprehensive instructions that came with my Remington Professional Silk Rollers kit. I discovered that I needed to wind the sections of hair around the roller and roll up to the roots so that the roller was underneath my hair. The instructions promised that this would give me the Hollywood glamour look I’d been desperately trying to achieve! Other options included using rollers from front-to-back on the top section of your hair for volume rather than curls, and the hair could be rolled up the opposite way to give a flicked-out look. I never imagined that rollers could be so versatile!
I enlisted the help of my mother, who talked me through her experiences of hair styling using rollers in the 60s while we clipped the heated rollers into the hair. The ends of the rollers were cool to touch and even the velvety middles weren’t too hot to handle so it was an easy process and before long every hair was curled and clipped up. It was just a case of being patient and waiting for the rollers to cool down. I expect that the curls could probably be released sooner for a more relaxed wave but I wanted to try it out ‘properly’ during this first attempt so I waited until all the clips and rollers were totally cold. I’m guessing that this helped to set the curl so that it lasts longer because they looked very bouncy as they tumbled out of the rollers!
The hair actually looked more glossy than usual and you could really see all the highlights in each of the curls, which added to the Hollywood glamour effect. The rollers even added volume and I think it gave the effect of practically double the quantity of hair that went into the rollers in the first place! I didn’t use hair spray to set the curls but they still lasted a good amount of time – I really wanted to give the curls a good test it out so that I’d know whether they would last. Next time I use the rollers I will definitely use hairspray afterwards because I think this would help my hair style look great and last through even the bounciest of jive dances!
Let me know what you think about this hairstyle and I’d love to hear if you have any tips for making curls last longer. Also please share your ideas for different hairstyles using rollers because I’ll definitely be using these again and again to style my hair! Tweet me @Cassiefairy or leave me a comment below.
