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!