Technical - Curling

Practical session on curling hair.

The curls we used were spiral curls and horizontal curls using a medium sized tong.

Sectioning the hair is important in tonging hair firstly to keep your style neat and clean and to be able to work methodically and it also helps with timing too, if you try to do a few very large sections your curls will not be to the standard that you want and will more than likely drop out.
A large section will heat the hair that is nearer to the tong itself and closer tot he heat and if the hair is too thick the heat wont be enough on the outside of your section. Heating the curl unevenly will result in a poor finish. Also on this note, the ends of the hair and the underneath of your section will have been in contact with the heat source for far too long and you risk burning the hair before it has all heated enough. To avoid this a small section will wrap around the tong more evenly and wont have to be in contact for as long to create your curl, preserving the condition of the hair and creating a longer lasting neater curl.

Also before applying any kind of heat to the hair you should carry out a consultation on the condition of the hair, some hair will require higher heat, whereas some will not need as much and will still curl well.

We practiced this on the Katie head and used on side for spiral curls and the other for the barrel curls.
The end result of this was that you will still get a similar effect on both sides but the horizontal curls allow you to add lift to the root of the hair and finish with a more voluminous style. Its important to change direction of your curls as well or you may end up with one big curl as they will all sit together.
For looser curls you can just let the hair drop and sit on its own and the hair will drop as its cooling but to preserve a tighter longer lasting curl we wrapped the hair around on itself whilst still hot and gripped it in place whilst it cooled. This is essentially a dry set, the hair structure isnt changed from wet to dry but it is heated and cooled in a certain shape.

This side of my katie head was the spiral curls and as you can see the hair lacks volume at the roots in comparison with the other side but the curls are still neat and hold up well.

  

This side of the katie head was the barrel curls and there is a definite difference to how the curls sit, they tend to stay in the barrel shape and lift up at the root.
I preferred this side to the other as I am a big fan of big hair to lift at the roots is important to me.











The same technique we used can be seen in the video below.

And this is what you shouldn't do...