A Wild Hair : When Good Wigs Gets Better

At about 3 A.M. one morning I decided my 18th century “big wig” just wasn’t big enough. It’s not that I thought it ugly, it just wasn’t the right shape. It was also beginning to deflate, so initially I set out to take all the pins out of it, tease the roots some more, and re-pile the hair (see this tutorial to learn how to do this).

This is precisely what I did, only to create the same thing over again – the same shape, the same weight, the same size. I took the wig down again and teased it more, this time finally figuring out the *proper* way to tease, which would be to hold onto just a couple strands of the hair chunk and let the rest run up the hair-shafts. My teasing frenzy produced excellent results: an enormous ball of wild fluff. It was still too long, though.

It was then that my crazy and delirious side espied the scissors sitting innocently on the table. I snatched them up and began lobbing off the ends of the hair that were still hanging down belong the Hair Cloud. More teasing and more clipping, plus two or three pins to hold back the front chunks o’ hair, and I had something outstanding.

I put the wig on – already it was half the weight – and stared at myself in the mirror for at least two whole minutes, thinking I looked shockingly Duchessque. Feeling quite happy with myself, I put the Hair Cloud back on the block, and went off to sleep satisfied. A job well done!

So, what did we learn from Lauren’s wild hair-hacking adventure?…
1) buy a shorter wig. Try to find one about shoulder-length, and already quite curly.
2) tease the proper way – this is hard to explain, but “let the hair slip through your finger as you back-comb it, instead of hanging onto it”
3) you don’t need 1039109 bobbypins, just a few to hold the front pieces in place.

Go to it, girls!