18th century hair styling

So over the last days I've tried to style my hair in 18th century styles. I can do a decent pouf, as seen here, but that has never been my favorite hairstyle, and at least at the moment my 18th century wardrobe is a bit later than when the pouf was fashionable. Of course I am dreaming of one day having a huge hedgehog hairstyle, but in order to achieve that I would need to style a wig, and now I only had my own hair to work with.

One day my hairstyle will rival the Duchess of Devonshire's.

For the photoshoot at Staberg I started the evening before that and put my hair in a lot of pincurls.

I did the pincurls by first wetting my hair and then rolling it around my fingers. I didn't really have a strategy so I just rolled and pinned the hair up. When all the hair was up I dampened it some more, and then I put it all under a buff so that I would be able to sleep on it without the curls coming loose.

The reason why I prefer pincruls is because when they are pinned up and under the buff there's no problem sleeping on it. I've tried to sleep with the hair bound up on both foamrollers and hard plastic rollers, and it's been so uncomfortable that I haven't slept much at all.

This is what my hair looked like the next morning, when I had removed the pins.

My hair naturally falls in a very visible part, if it's allowed to fall by itself, so to avoid that I pinned the middle section back, and then I simply started to tease the hair as much as I could. I actually think my hair is a bit too long for a really good bushy hairstyle, because it tends to droop down. I tried to solve that by pinning the end of the hair up under the rest of the hair.

This close up from Staberg is the one that shows off the hair best. It's quite nice, but it's not enormous enough. I want more hair. I also think I need to practice teasing the hair better.

Now today I dressed up in 18th century style again, but today I wanted to use my gaulle and go for a 1790's look instead. The event was a small scale affair, and since I went there alone I don't have any pictures from it. I did try out driving in stays though, and since I hadn't cinched them totally that was no problem. the last few kilometers when I had stayed, cinched the stays and put on the gaulle was no fun though.

Anyway for the hair today I realized that after all I have the wonderful 18th century hair & wig styling book, so why not use it. What I really like about this book is that it has both an extensive chapter with photos of portraits and what the hairstyles actually looked like, and then it also has the instructions on how to achieve them. For this hairstyle I mostly followed the instructions for the "Adela - simple short and long hairstyle".  Working with my own hair I knew that I wouldn't be able to achieve the full style, but looking at the reference pictures in the first part of the book I felt that I could achieve something quite good anyway.

Just like with the previous hairstyle I started the day before with rolling the hair up. The main difference is that I was more thorough with how I parted it, making two distinct sections of hair (back and front). I also rolled the curls in front with the help of roll form, it's a spoonhandle from the kitchen. This made the curls a lot more uniform. In the back I used larger foamrolls for the hair. Unfortunately I ran out of foamrollers so I had to braid the hair and hope that I would be able to heat set it with my curling iron in the morning. The curling iron didn't give anything like results of the wetset curls though, so in the end I simply took those bad curls and pinned them up under the rest of the hair to give it some volume.

When I took out the foamrollers and the pins I didn't brush out the looks. I simply used my fingers to shake the out a bit and added a hairband.

I'm quite pleased with this hairstyle, but when I do it again I would like to use a bigger roll form and see what difference that would make to the hairstyle.