The way the top of the hair is parted is also important, this one has a zigzag pattern. It would be better if it was a straight part of even no part so it’s less obvious when you brush it all backwards.
So what we want to do is create a lot of volume at the top and sides to make the big lion’s mane effect. The first step is to grab a section in the middle/top and pull it up. I am using a teasing comb to do this, it’s awesome because it has alternating long and short bristles so it catches all of the short hairs and teases perfectly… which it should being a teasing comb and all.
Back to it, grab a section at the top towards the back of your head. Leave around 2cm of hair between the section you’re taking and where you want the fringe/bangs to start. At the moment we just want to create a lot of volume before we use the front to cover it all up.
Pull forward and tease the back of the section around 3-4 inches from the root. By teasing/backcombing what I’m doing here is combing from the middle back down to the roots. The teasing brush catches all of the shorter hairs and meshes them together into a tangle which gives the piece of hair volume and texture.
Once you’ve teased it a reasonable amount it should have volume all on it’s own, you will of course look like an extra out of a Dr Seuss book at this point.
So that’s the volume part but the front looks terrible so to fix that we need to smooth down the front. Take your comb and using light short strokes brush lightly back over the front section. You may need to hold the wig in place while you do this. Don’t let the bristles of the comb sink into the hair too deeply or you will basically be undo-ing all of the teasing you just did.
Once you have smoothed the front over it should look something like this from the side…
That’s really all there is too it, just a lot of teasing, smoothing and eventually hair spraying. This wig is perfect for styling like this because it has lots of short layers. Clip the section you just styled out of the way, we will come back to it later.
The next step is to give the wig more volume all over so it start to get into the right basic shape: lion’s mane XD
Starting with small sections from the sides, hold the piece of hair out at a 90 degree angle and tease the 3 inches closest to the root.
Repeat this until you’ve done every piece of hair on each side. Don’t touch the front area between the first section we did or the fringe.
Now keep going to the back. Pull the sections upwards and tease at the roots. You can see in this photo the individual tracks of hair and my pink tips showing through XD
Don’t forget to do the underneath sections too, they are very important because they hold the rest of the style up!
Below you can see how much volume is created just by teasing at the roots. Because this wig is more wavy than actually curly I decided to play up the curls by teasing them at the ends slightly too. To do this, you grab the end of a curl by the tip and run the comb from the tip up a couple of inches. Only do this once per curl otherwise you disturb them rather than accentuating them. Basically you’re pushing the curl up the strand of hair so it looks… curlier.
Now it’s time to finish the top section finally! Unclip it and we’ll get to work :D
At this point it should look something like this…
The final step involves the sections between the top and fringe that we’ve been saving. Taking a small piece of hair from that area at a time, tease the back of it lightly and then sweep it backwards.
At this point hairspray will be your friend. I’m taking a lot of spray. You can see below I’ve started sweeping the front back on the left side but not the right yet.So it’s starting to come together.
Because you are trying to brush pieces of the wig in directions they weren’t designed to go in, doing this will take some trial and error. Getting mine to stay took a whole lot of hairspray and then a lot of teasing and smoothing over the front…. tease, smooth, spray, tease, smooth,spray over and over.
This is starting to look more like the finished product now but not there yet.
Half finished from the back it looks very messy so this area needs to be combed and sprayed as well.
After continuing with the combing and spraying, paying careful attentions to the sides as well as the top this was my finished product:
From the side:
Now looking at the photos I can see areas I intend to improve, for example cutting more layers into the back and using that to creating more defined curls.
You can see below that it definitely needs a few more layers to make the top pouf look more natural with the loose hair below. Until I do that (or if you don’t trust yourself cutting into a wig) this can be temporarily hidden with a big bow.
From the back:
With the addition of some accessories I’m quite happy with the way it turned out considering it was a first attempt. When I make the changes I’m planning I will be sure to post photos of that too :)
Bonus photo: Taking off the wig and scaring the hell out of James with by real hair because he was so used to the wig XD
The wig by itself from the front:
The back:
Side:
So there you go, that was my first adventure into wig styling and I’m quite happy with the outcome. Of course there are a lot of areas that I need to improve in and this isn’t the best example of a hime style wig but I can see where I want to go from here and that’s all for another post! I think to style the back and sides I will make James wear it so I can see what I’m doing better hahaha!
Hope you enjoyed my bout of Hime Gyaru wig styling ^_^ |
