Not all curling irons are made equal!

This week we continued with our styling chapter, which includes blow drying, flat ironing, and curling. Curling irons are different in the cosmetology industry, because our tool is modified for professional use. Curling irons that most people are familiar with have a spring in the clamp that holds the hair in the iron as you curl it. Professional curling irons, called marcels, don't! They have a second, smaller handle that you have to manipulate to control the pressure on the hair and wind the hair around the barrel.

Marcels, like almost everything we learn, take a lot of practice to get the hang of. They feel totally awkward to work with and require of a lot of learned dexterity to use them correctly. When you are winding the hair, you have to click the hair in and as you rotate, you have to learn how to move your hand around the two handles without releasing the hair. I know this sounds confusing when I explain it, so imagine how difficult it is to actually use them!

For state board exams we have to use marcel irons, but when we are out of school and working we can use whatever irons we like. Now that I'm starting to get the hang of marcels, I can see that they have some advantages for certain hairstyles. I think when I'm out of school, I'll have a combination of marcels, spring clamps, and no-clamp curling irons, because they all give different looks!

One of the first things we learned with marcels (after a lengthy demonstration on how to use them and about 30 minutes of practice with them turned off) was how to use them to mimic a ROLLER SET! Who would've guessed? We had to do three of those heads, and then we learned spiral curls. Spiral curls are what you would think of as someone simply curling their hair - vertical curls all around the head.

By this point, I was already moving pretty quickly with the iron and flew through my spiral curls. I love when we do something in class that I can actually see someone wearing in the 21st century or that I would do on myself, and spiral curls are exactly that!

I'm slightly ahead of most of the girls in my class, so after my spiral curls my instructor let me have some free time. I was super excited because I saw this technique on Shear Genius (a hair competition on Bravo) that I was dying to try. The girl on the show, Janine, did something called a "zig-zag set," which I had never heard of. It looked like she took oversized hair pins and weaved the hair in it, then set it with a flat iron. We didn't have any large hair pins at school, so I tried it with regular hair pins.

It was harder than I expected, but I imagine it would be a lot easier with bigger pins. We also only have 2 inch flat irons in the classroom, which made it really hard to grab the pin with the iron without burning myself or the hair unraveling. I finally got a few done and pull the pins out and brushed out the hair.

It's hard to see the texture in this picture, but the set created the craziest, most extremely curly style. When you touched it, it was so light and airy it almost felt like cotton candy. I can't imagine how else to achieve this texture if the client didn't have it naturally. A couple of girls in my class said it looked like pubes - gross!

I don't like the way it turned out with the small pins at all. On the show, the style was much better and more wearable, although still quite avant garde. It definitely wouldn't be something I would be able to use very often in my career (unless I somehow start doing a lot of fashion hair for shows or photoshoots :D), but it was fun to figure out how Janine did it. I think it's a unique technique to have in my back pocket in case I ever need it!

In theory this week we are learning about electricity and electrical safety. It is a mostly common sense chapter, but nonetheless important because we use electrical tools all the time in cosmetology. Our test is on Tuesday and it should be a breeze!

100 Hours!

As of Saturday, our class officially hit our 100 hour mark :) Technically, I'm only at 92 hours since I missed the first Saturday, but I've decided I deserve to celebrate anyway! On the one hand, 100 hours seems like such a long time and such an accomplisment, but on the other hand, 100 hours is only 1/15th of the way there!

This week, I finally started to believe that we are getting out of fingerwaves, pincurls, ridge curls, and skip waves. I know I'll see them occasionally, but we are, at long last, moving on to skills we will use on a more regular basis. Hurrah!

On Saturday, we started learning blow outs, which as you know are one of my favorite things to do. A perfect blowout is such a simple, polished statement and it's the best way to show off your cut. 

The outside mannequins are two of my blowouts, one of them just a standard round brush, and the other a spiral set. I wasn't too happy with the spiral set, but I didn't have any product at my disposal, so I didn't take it too hard. 

See that mannequin in the middle? That's a whole different story. Remember how excited I was to be done with roller sets, only to discover I would be doing more roller sets? Then remember how excited I was to be done with those roller sets? I should've seen this coming - more roller sets! 

These roller sets are actually intended to mock rollers, because we don't actually use them in the style. You use a round brush in the same manner you would use a roller, but you roll and set it with heat at the same time using a blow dryer. Stick a pin curl clip in there while you finish the whole head, and you've got a faux roller set. It's actually a much easier and more tolerable method than roller sets, but I'd still rather not have to do any more roller-esque styles for a couple of weeks. Wishful thinking!

Drugstore Shampoo is the Devil!

Wraps are officially the coolest hairstyle we have learned so far because they turn out with completely ridiculous volume that even Snooki would be jealous of.

This is the finished flat wrap. Unfortunately, I wasn't neat enough in the crown area and I had to wet a small section and dry it to sit correctly, so that killed a little bit of the volume. But oh boy, if I was ever disappointed in the volume of the flat wrap, the doobie wrap certainly made up for it.

This is my almost-finished doobie wrap. I did a little more tweaking with a flat iron and some teasing to blend the crown after I took this picture, but you get the idea. 

We had an extra long night in theory on Thursday because we did some pH experiments with drugstore shampoos like Pantene, Dove, Suave, and Herbal Essences. 

Naturally, hair has a pH of 5. While some extreme pHs are required for certain chemical services, ideally we don't want to use shampoo and conditioner that strays too far from a pH of 5. For instance, if your shampoo is a 6, you would want to use a conditioner with a pH of 4 to balance you hair.

Of all the brands we tested, no shampoo/conditioner set would balance the pH of your hair. We did conclude that Tresemme was the best drugstore brand, though! My philosophy on hair care is this: you wear your hair every day, so why not spend a little more money on it?

A Visit from "The Man"

Wednesday was a long day for everyone at school, from the instructors, to the students, to the director. We had a visit from State Board all throughout the day, and they weren't too kind to us. A lot of the daytime advanced class students were grilled at their stations about safety and sanitary regulations, and apparently a lot of the areas of the school were not up to par. Of course, the school isn't at all filthy or unsanitary, but we just have some areas that we need to improve. Luckily, we didn't drop a grade, so we just have to make cleanliness a higher priority and we'll be prepared the next time they come.

Our instructors and the director of the school were definitely NOT happy with us and the whole school got a decent lecture before we started class. Once my class and the advanced class were dismissed, my class spent about an hour painstakingly cleaning our kits. Some of our brushes took 5 minutes a piece to clean, and the hair had to be removed strand by strand.

Lesson learned (and this doesn't just apply to cosmetology): if you clean a little bit every day, things never get out of hand. Our kits had been neglected for too long, and now our instructor has rearranged our class schedule to allow for kit-cleaning time at the end of each class.

When we were finally done with cleaning, we only had a short amount of time left in practical, so we learned a relatively simple new technique called wrapping. This is mostly popular with clients with ethnic hair, and is basically a really low maintenance style. You literally wrap the hair around the head and it ends up looking like a chocolate donut (if the hair is brown!). It's either set in the dryer, or you sleep in it. When you brush it out, the ends are smooth and the crown has crazy volume.

There are two kinds of wraps:

A flat wrap

and a doobie wrap!

I picked this up on my first try, but I had a little advantage because my roommate freshman year of college was black and I watched her do this every night. I was always so intrigued by the idea of brushing your hair in a complete circle and it turning into a socially acceptable style by morning (mine sure wouldn't turn out that way!). I never knew much about African-American hair until I lived with her, so I'm glad I finally got a chance to use some of the knowledge I gathered from her :)

Brush Ups and Down Time

On Tuesday, we didn't do much in practical class. Most of us had a brush up style (6 rollers on top, ridge curls on the side, and square base half-stem pincurls in the back) to brush out, which was more difficult than any of us anticipated. The style just required a lot of manipulation and fine tuning that I think we will all become better at as the weeks go. There's a certain finesse with hair that our instructors and a lot of the advanced class students have that I can't wait to achieve. It's not something you can study or a technique you can learn, it's just something that comes with lots of experience and practice with hair.

This is my final brush up style. It's not the most modern style or my favorite style, but it tests a lot of our basic skills and I can appreciate why we need to learn it. I actually needed a lot of help from my instructor to get the front to sit right (which you can't really see in this picture), as well as to get the definition between the ridge curl and the pin curls behind the ear to stand out.

After we did our brush ups, we spent about an hour and a half working in our textbook and workbooks, which is a rarity in practical class. We also did about an hour of bookwork in theory on our new chapter, chemistry, which I was surprised to find out was literally about chemistry, not chemistry and hair. I got decent grades in high school chemistry, so I've been able to breeze through the material pretty quickly.