Vintage Wedding Hairstyle Advice: Fine hair best practices

I recently did a practice with a bride that is getting married this summer, and I thought she would be a good example to share. She has a very common issue she has to work around, actually 2 issues.

1. She has very fine hair.  

2. It is baby soft too. Her hair will not hold a curling iron curl for more than 5 minutes. I did a test curl on her hair and it was flat within minutes with just a little comb through. 

Lot’s of women who have hair like this struggle with doing vintage hairstyles. Since most of the basis for vintage hair involves curls and body, fine hair like this can be frustrating.

Luckily, her hair does do okay with a wet set. She knew from experience that if she set her hair in rollers the night before, she could hang onto the curl a lot longer. Using the Rockin’ Rollers and some setting lotion, I rolled her hair in a specific pattern. It is a very similar pattern to the Lillian hairstyle in Create Vintage-Inspired Wedding Hairstyles.

She sat under my fancy ion hooded hairdryer for 20 minutes. That wasn’t quite enough time. She should have been under there for 30 minutes. With the hair at a certain wet level with these rollers, you need to give even fine hair a little more time to dry.

It also helps to use end wraps to spread the hair ends a little which creates a domino effect of spreading the entire hair section a little more as you curl it into the roller, thereby shortening drying time.

Hopefully you can tell in the image above that there is a method to the madness. Her hair is parted above the left eyebrow. The 2 rollers below the part on the left of the head are rolled at a diagonal wrapping toward the face. There are 2 rollers to the right of the part above the forehead and they are rolled toward the right of the head on-base. Everything else is rolled toward the floor. The rollers are placed in parallel lines so that the waves will line up with each other.

For the actual style, I wrapped the hair at the nape of the neck up and pinned it to give it the faux bob look.

Beginning at the lower level of the hairstyle, I then took sections parallel to the floor and combed them into loose waves and worked my way up this way to the top, taking care not to overwork them. With waves being styled at the bottom first, they add something for the upper waves to rest on and therefore hold the upper waves a little higher for more volume.

Wedding Veil Tip: Her veil you ask? It’s actually made up of 2 parts. The headband was supposed to be a sash for a wedding dress. We wrapped it like a headband style vintage wedding veil and then used a basic comb veil placed at the lower back of the hairstyle so that it looked like it was all one piece.

For a wedding day, the more volume at the beginning of the process the better, because as the day wears on the hair loses its umph and then the pictures look bad because the hair looks flat and lifeless. Always consider how it is going to look in a picture at first and over time. Those pictures are going to live with the bride for the rest of her life!

Below is her look on the wedding day. We used the Rockin’ Rollers on the day and she looks beautiful.