Fundamentals of curling

The Fundamentals of Hair – Curling

In this lesson we were taught two different curls one was a spiral curl and one was a barrel curl. We also learnt how to brickwork curl, which is a technique used to curl hair to stop gaps in the curls appearing once they have been brushed out.

The first curl we made is called a spiral curl, we started off by sectioning half the head so we could do half the head with spiral curl and half with the barrel curl. Once we had our section we started from the bottom on the section working our way up so we could see clearly everything that had already been curled. The way you create the spiral curl is by holding the curling wand upwards which you will see in the image below. We took small sections and made sure that every other curl was curled in a different direction (towards the face and then away from the face), which creates the most volume in the hair and also makes more texture in the hair because they all don’t blend together once you brush it out. Once we had finished each curl we then pinned it to the head to keep in the shape and stop it from dropping out while cooling, its also a good idea when on a job because your model might have to go get makeup done next before the photo shoot so this means the curls will stay firmly in the hair.

Once we brushed put the curls you get a really nice ringlet curl, which sits really nicely. I really like this curl because you can see the definition in the curl and don’t loose that beautiful ringlet effect.

When creating the barrel curl we did the same where we took small sections but this time we created longer sections going across the head because this curl is more about giving volume to the hair. We started from the bottom sections and worked our way up. With this technique we were trying to create the most volume possible so to create this you would hold the curlers quite high then clamp the hair and roll towards the head. Holding the curlers higher than the section creates that lift in the hair. We use the same technique of pinning the curls as we go because we didn’t want to loose any volume because of the hair dropping down. After all the curls had cooled down and set we took out all the pins and brushed through with our fingers. This outcome is very different from the other technique because in this one you cant see a defiant curl you see more volume. You can also see a lot of difference between the two techniques because one had lifted the hair a lot more and can see by comparing the length on both sides. This curl would be used to mainly create volume in the hair.

The next technique we used is called the brickwork technique; this is mainly to create a really smooth finish while getting a lot of volume in the hair. Sometimes if you don’t use this technique while curling you will notice gaps in the hair, which will be really hard to get rid of. By using this your covering the gaps up while you place then in this order.

Over all I really enjoyed learning about the different curling techniques because it shows you how to get the most volume out of using a curling wand. I found that the spiral curls took me a lot longer than doing the barrel curls, I realty need to take this into account if I’m going to use this technique in one of my assignments because it does take a long time to curl and pin everyone of them. I think also I need to practise these techniques on someone that has longer hair than the Katie head because I would like to see the effect it gives on hair which is longer because it looks overly fluffy on the Katie head and I think it would look a lot nicer on natural long hair.