as small as a world and as large as alone, karalianne: Like I said yesterday, I hate having...

8:09pm May 5, 2014

Like I said yesterday, I hate having things covering my ears. But I did it all day yesterday for May the Fourth. I did it for the Internet and for science.

Way back in 2010, skepchick featured a blog post called “Mythbusting Princess Leia’s Hair,” in which the author went through most of the styles from the movies and explained how they were impossible to do without hairpieces. Now, it is fairly obvious that Carrie Fisher (the actress who portrayed Leia) was wearing hairpieces for pretty much everything, because her real hair was not long enough to do the styles anyway. But I decided I should give it a shot anyway.

I’m doing them in order, and Star Wars Day seemed like a great excuse to start the project. So, like I said, for the Internet and for science.

Now, I have knee-length hair. So that’s the first thing to remember as I take you through this. My buns are not as large as Leia’s because seriously each of her buns is as large as one of mine and I have to wrap at least five times (not once) to make a bun as large as my head.

Something to keep in mind about hair is that it generally gets thinner as you get closer to the end, especially when it’s as long as mine. This is often called “fairy tale ends” and it’s not my favourite (I prefer one-length and a nice blunt cut) but it’s a fact of life with hair this long. Given how Leia’s buns are wrapped, I had to find a way to reproduce that with my incredibly long-ass hair. The other problem is that her buns are really thick, and while I have a lot of hair if you split it in half it doesn’t look all that impressive.

My solution was pretty simple but it turned out to be somewhat complicated to execute. As a result, this hair style took me an hour to create. (Note also that I was doing this by myself to my own head and we can safely assume that Leia had someone to do her hair for her, at least with this first style.)

I put my hair in pigtails and did my best to get them even. Then I twisted a little bit (maybe five twists, to the outside) and folded my pigtail in half. I wound the end of the pigtail around the elastic that was holding my hair and then I pinned it in place. The resulting pigtails landed just below my shoulders.

Then I just had to twist into buns and pin in place. I used a Spin Pin (from Goody, I love these things) to hold the end in the back and then I used bobby pins to hold the top and pull the front in a bit so the buns would cover my ears more.

You can see in the pictures that my left side is better than my right side. There was something wrong with the right side and I could not make it go as well as I wanted it to.

This style did last all day - we went to church, then to see the new Spider-Man movie, then to Steampunk Tea Meeting - though I had to push bobby pins back in as they tried to escape, and I did take out the Spin Pin on the right side once and pulled the end further in and put the Spin Pin back in.

In the blog post she says that Leia’s style lasts the whole time and that’s implausible. I will note that it is really common for people to adjust their hair throughout the day, and her hair doesn’t stay perfect all the time anyway. There’s a screencap that clearly shows part of Leia’s bun falling out at the bottom, so obviously she had to retuck parts of her buns periodically. Just because we don’t see her doing it doesn’t mean she didn’t.

So that is the first Leia style. I’m not sure when I’ll do the next one (the stacked braids at the awards ceremony thing) but I have ideas for it already (of course). Hope you enjoyed!

(My husband keeps talking about “next time” I do this one. I keep telling him not to get his hopes up. It takes too long and like I said, I hate having my ears covered.)