hello if you've been following my channel for a while then you're probably very well aware that i love historical hairstyles and have for a long time it's really fun to try them out but i've got to say it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that hair ties rubber bands elastics like this were not a thing for historical hairstyles now yes if you would ask me point blank did the medieval people use rubber bands no of course not rubber bands weren't really a thing until the 20th century b
ut being the modern person that i am i use them whether i'm going to just plain old work or to a historical event that's what i knew so that's what i used but about two years ago or so i can't say for sure i didn't exactly mark the date on the calendar for when i was going to start using historical hairstyles but i know it's been at least a year because of the video that i did with rachel and bernadette and curling is really hard what happens when your hair is longer than your arm though see my
hairstyle is easy who is it i've had a goodly amount of time to experiment with what styles work well for me my hair and my lifestyle and uh without further ado let's just go ahead and get started so i do want to start out with a classic which is elizabethan hair taping i need a brush success so hair taping is something that you see in portraiture and statues and little miniatures this is definitely the method that i was familiar with first and had some success with and i'll kind of explain why
shortly here but you're going to start off by putting your hair into two braids if you have shorter hair then you might want to start it like kind of right behind the ear in order to have more braid to put over top your head one braid right now we're just going to leave the ends like so once you're nicely braided up you are going to again if it you have shorter hair you're going to want to put your two braids just straight up so that they can overlap somewhere in the middle up here i can go ahea
d and go around the back and then up and over and for right now i mean you would to some extent want to try and tuck the ends underneath but it is tricky to do too much of that when things aren't tied down yet this is where using things like flaxseed gel might come in handy i read about it in one of the issues of complete anachronist and it's a cool thing that i have not really done much experimenting with myself yet someday though but once you've got your braids mostly in place and keep holding
onto them for now you're going to take a big blunt needle with a ribbon about two yards or so and we are just oh this has already started coming undone ah okay and we're just going to start sewing the braid try and hold everything in place once you've gotten a few stitches in you'll have to be less particular about holding it in place i'm just going to leave that there for a second and we're going to try and do this side i'm going to re-tuck it under thread my ribbon part of the trick here is d
efinitely trying to make sure that you don't accidentally catch your own tail and then you would tie the ribbons now my problem with this method is one it tends to be a little bit messier i find it difficult to do this without using any sort of additional material whether that's a rubber band or using like additional threads to like tie up the ends of your braids first and then do the hair taping part of it it's also a little bit difficult to get the bands of ribbon that are visible to be very l
ike even and neat it's helpful if you have somebody else doing it on your head but that's not always possible all in all not bad because you're sewing it to your scalp hair it's pretty hard for it to fall off so it is once you have it looking how you want it a nice like all-day hairstyle so that's kind of cool i just found it fiddly enough that i would pretty much only ever do this for events and never like for funsies it's just annoying enough that i ended up not using it so while that does wor
k for some of the hairstyles that you see in portraiture i i kept seeing these paintings where the ribbon that was used to tie off the hair was clearly going along the individual braids rather than with the two braids together and i i kept wondering like why if this hair taping with a needle is how they do it i don't know something about this just doesn't quite make sense and you know i was definitely having a bit of trouble with that and i did some experimenting so i did try to see if i could w
rap the ribbon around my hair but i kept having trouble and i'll show you personally whenever i do my hair in the style or any of these styles i usually like to twist the front part of my hair i feel like it makes the hair sturdier throughout the day you get less like wispies falling out as the day goes on and i also think that if you are doing any sort of taping or pinning or whatever the hair going in two different directions here kind of like in a v formation gives your pins or your hair tapi
ng something to grab onto just a little bit better than the plain old hair going all the way down smoothly look twisty on this side too i just realized the back of my head probably not even at all that's fine so taking it about in the middle and putting that mid way kind of behind your neck hold on to one side until you've twisted it enough that you're not really gonna pull the other half so my problem was though that once i got towards the end i i didn't really know how to secure this ribbon en
d so that it would stay in place you know i tried kind of tying a little knot into the end and seeing if that would stay but this will get progressively looser and looser because it's not it's not really well anchored obviously it helps once you've got both sides done so let me do that really quick here and i'll put it up okay so now i have my pre-wrapped hair braids and okay i guess next step would be to wrap them around so like in the portraiture you have the two separately wrapped braid look
i should have put the ribbon a little bit more often so that you get more of the ribbon visible but what now how do i get this to stay up once i let go of my hand there are some pins that have been found especially like u-pins and straight pins and i've mentioned those in past videos particularly the straight pins but there's so many images of women in a state of undress or getting dressed it really feels like it's just ribbon so i thought okay i think i think i have an idea because in some of t
hem can see extra bands of ribbon visible in front so i'm like okay maybe what i need here is longer braid also this is another thing that i hate about this if you take down the braids the the twist is going to slide down my ribbon has started falling off and it's not it's it's not a great style for being able to like re-pin it back up because it just it gets so messy and unwieldy here are my longer ribbons i this is just under four yards but i don't think of it that way i think of it as i put i
t on top of my head and the ends of the strings are both lying on the floor i can definitely get away with shorter of course but i have found this to be a link that works really really well with me so i've discovered the problem with that previous twisty twisty style and i tried it over and over again trying to make it work and it was just so frustrating that it didn't want to do what you need to do is you need to anchor both ends so we're going to do that on the top you can use the needle or yo
u can just kind of like put the ribbon on your hand kind of like so and then grab a chunk of hair and just kind of gently pierce through it once i have it kind of a little headband up here i check by looking at the floor that my two ribbons are approximately even okay looks good and then hold on to one there we go i'm just kind of doing this quickly for you guys because i don't want it to take too terribly long worrying about getting it all perfect but whenever i'm doing it as a day-to-day style
and you may have noticed over the past probably six months or so i've been doing the style a lot because i really really like it what i'll do is in front of the mirror i'll check that there's two hair bumps in between each of the the wraps and that helps give it a very even look once i get to the end what i'll do is i'll anchor it in rather than just simply tying a knot and hoping that it stays because it won't what i will do is i will simply undo my braid and then i just go ahead and braid it
back up again with the ribbon integrated as part of that braid just a couple inches is plenty to help lock in the ribbon with the end of the hair i wrap it around and tie a knot boop and now this is pretty dang sturdy i have pretty much zero issues with this falling or like working its way out through the day which is fantastic and now i don't have to worry about the top of my spirals trying to slide down because it's locked in with this hair band and i don't have to worry about the bottom slipp
ing off so what i can do now and this is this is the part that i'm almost even more excited about than the sturdy wrapping take it and wrap it around again if you have short hair you might just go straight over top in my case i like to go around the bottom and then over top now you can see that this side is going to go behind my ear and in front of the braid this side is on the other side other side of the the big braid i'm just going to loop it underneath so that the end you can now see it here
is behind my ear now if you want to get really particular you can kind of like make sure that the new string is covering up the little ends of the braid that are under here honestly i don't bother i just go ahead and do the wrap like so tie a knot in the back or not a bow and usually the braid ends just tuck themselves in if they don't though you can kind of carefully poke poke poke underneath your braid and neat beautiful this is a little bit more far forward than i usually go for i usually go
a little further back sometimes i'll kind of pull the forward forward forward the forehead hair forward so that it is just a little bit more loose and i don't know it's less tight looking i feel like having a little bit of looseness right here looks nice so even better if you've got bangs or like fringe that you can take out i have a bit of fringe that sometimes i'll pull out in order just to help soften the whole look which i think is super cute but that is what she looks like and i have been
so happy with this it's become maybe not my everyday style but like at least every other day style i'm a big big fan i really like taking these wispies and curling them so like i've got cute little curly wispies which is fun i've been really really happy with it as it's staying power i could 100 see someone 500 years ago whether they're working the fields or doing other like daily tasks throughout the day this stays it's beautifully neat the the way that these ribbons form kind of like a little
v going down the the braid is looks just like the images i'm so happy with it you don't have to mess with it it doesn't get messy you can do it by yourself super easily if you do late medieval through to like 16th century hairstyles i think taking this and modifying it to be more correct like with a center part instead of a side part and um you know if you want to add the little tiny twist that you sometimes see in 16th century you can do that that's really the main reason i made this video is b
ecause i wanted to share that i think this works beautifully and i'm so so so excited about it so i wanted to get it out of the way and share why i love it so much also it's kind of cute sometimes i'll wear this as the next day style for this one if like i didn't take it down that night the next day i'll just flop these down and be like good enough this is my hairstyle today but let's take this down i want to show you a few more things like let's say you want to go to work you want something jus
t a little bit more sedate i feel you i understand pins doesn't hurt like if you really want the extra security to keep the the braids from going off the back of your head you can toss in a u-pin like this and put it on the back of the two braids like one on the side and then a second one on this side and that'll be extra extra extra firm so i i kind of meant to do this video in chronological order from like what i first understood hair taping to be and how to use ribbon to tie up your hair to l
ike little advances i had made and then the resulting hairstyle that i just showed you but apparently i was just too excited i had i had to show you that because i love that i had one understanding of what hair taping was and through experimentation and looking at images i found a i think very plausible version of what hair taping is or could have been no definitive statements here but here is another thing that i will do sometimes just go ahead and braid the ribbon in with your hair if you're w
anting a more subtle look for like an everyday hairstyle this is nice and from what i can tell a period hairstyle there's at least one image that i can think of where you if you look up really closely at a woman's hair it looks like she has some sort of green ribbon braided in with her hair there's another one with that that over headband ribbon thing i think it's a black ribbon and it's over top and then there's a braid and then mysteriously the ribbon just kind of appears again at the end of t
he braid that's basically the exact style i'm doing now now as you get further down the ribbon does become more visible so if you want like extra extra subtle go with a ribbon color that's going to match your hair color a little bit better so i'm going to braid the other side if you have a ribbon that's only let's say this long this absolutely works beautifully as they just leave it down hairstyle otherwise you can do exactly the same as before loop them up cross over the head now you don't have
to actually have all this extra string if you want you can totally tie make it much shorter than this right and tie it at the back of your head i like having it long because i enjoy that that kind of little emphasis headband thing so i actually have quite a bit of extra here normally i will just leave it i don't bother but if i want to i can kind of tuck it underneath that feels kind of right use a mirror to verify of course so if it if it looks bad just pretend it looks perfect because normall
y i would use a mirror to double check if you are doing the style where you only have enough hair so that you overlap it over top and you don't have enough to have that band in the back then i actually would go ahead and end your your braid up here your ribbons up here because that's where your hair is that you can hide the the bow and knots under so let's say you don't have a big old piece of ribbon just lying around to do this hairstyle with but you have some shorter bits of ribbon like so you
can take these and just tie the very ends of your braid so what you'll do is you will find the halfway point on your ribbon try and line up the ends of your hair in the ribbon approximately ish unbraid it to that point so you're just going to add it in to two of the three strands of your braid and then keep braiding like normal i do believe i've shown this particular style a couple of times i feel like i have so forgive me if this is a repeat for some of you but this is one of the things that i
was doing a lot earlier on and i think think is in fact exactly what i did for the rachel and bernadette video from a year ago which was i was tying up the ends of my braid using string or very thin ribbon so once i have it near the end you know just a couple inches left i take one of the two and wrap it around about three times or so take the other one and wrap it the opposite direction again about three times and then tie the two of them together into a single simple knot now let's say you ki
nd of want to combine the previous method in this one you want to be able to use two ribbons you know maybe you're not digging the headband look i don't know but you still want that extra length of ribbon in order to use it to tie up your braid so what you can do is this take a moderate length of ribbon let's a little over two feet maybe and then what you're going to do is you're going to match a short end of the braid to the hair like so and leave the other end long and then go ahead and braid
it just like we did a second ago braid braid braid braid and because we've locked in the loop of the braid into the hair this is nice and sturdy there we go so now i've got a pair of long braids i realize that these styles might not be very useful to anybody who isn't down with just like daily crown braid looks i like to try and make the bow kind of a cute size not too big not too small and then if the ends here are too long i try not to trim them in place because i like to reuse the same ribbon
s over and over and over and over and if i keep like re-trimming them every time they're just a little bit too long or something very quickly i'm going to end up with a whole bunch of really short ribbons so what i'll just do is take the end and tuck it underneath so that for the most part it's just the loop part the green is kind of cute with my pink if you are not much of a double braid fan that is fair i still have some suggestions for you while i work on getting this untied and re-braided le
t me talk to you a little bit about the sponsor of today's video june's journey whenever i'm not conducting years-long hair experiments or making vaguely historical-ish things i'm often playing games whether it's board games in the before times rpgs or a lot lately video games it is just such a pretty game it's a hidden object mystery game so you have these gorgeous scenes and you're hunting for items in the scene and it's just such a good chill game i'm a big fan especially whenever you wake up
at 6 a.m to feed and let your dogs out and then you're awake but you don't actually want to be up for the day yet so you go back to bed and hang out in the warm blankets it's a great time to hang out in bed warm and cuddly and played students journey helping june solve mysteries by finding clues and you also get a super cute little island to decorate which it's such a sweet little game and you can even play with friends so it's got just a little bit of everything it's free to download you can p
lay on android or ios whatever suits your fancy you should definitely give it a try by clicking on my link down below in the description and have fun it's just a very sweet sweet game all right so if you don't like double braids then you might consider the single braid the more mature sister of the double braid before i get to the end i'm going to go ahead and do some pre judging what's the word i i don't know what to call this this motion of like loosening your hair so it's not quite so slicked
back looking here's a very lovely little silk ribbon so i'm going to go ahead and add it in so when i do a single braid like this that i'm just going to leave down what i like to do is leave kind of an extra full tail at the end rather than going all the way to the the very ends again wrap one around let's just do twice wrap the other one the opposite direction twice and then we're going to tie a little bow and this is super cute just as a very decorative way to add ribbon to your hair i think
it's super sweet you don't see a lot of single braids in the late medieval renaissance periods but there are some it does exist it's just not as common as the double braids lastly i know some of you out there are probably thinking like do you really braid your hair every single day i do not some days i admit i'm lazy and i just i leave it down sometimes that's the vibe i'm into there are also plenty of days where i want my hair up and out of the way and i'm just not gonna deal with braiding it t
hat's where buns are fantastic so i'm a very big fan of the simple cinnamon bun you just wrap it around like so and then use a hair stick or a few pins whatever your preferred style is and your hair is up and done and out of the way in less than a minute my lovely darling husband has made me a bunch of hair sticks because he does wood turning but you can also find them online like etsy there's tons of handmaker people that have done awesome hair tools toys things to put in your hair you could al
so go for things like this it's a little hair comb fork thing i believe i got this on amazon for just a few dollars it's aluminum it's super light and similarly you can dig it into your bun and use it to hold the hair these are nice and secure i like these a lot so that pretty much covers a lot of the elastic-less hairstyles that i typically do and kind of a little bit of my journey in from figuring out hmm i see a thing and i want to replicate it and not having a lot of success to eventually wh
at i figured out were the ways to make it as successful as possible for me i'm excited there's a lot of styles that i'm still really looking forward to experimenting with see what what i can make work or not i hope you guys will have fun joining me when i get to them a few last parting thoughts before i let you guys go i really enjoyed this past year or two or three it's been a while i'm not sure of elastic list styles now that said of course i still have hair ties i don't use them very often bu
t i have them just in case i need them i do want to say that if anybody wants to continue doing like historical styles using elastics because that's what worked for them absolutely keep doing that use whatever works for you and you know makes it so that you can achieve the look that you're happy with this is absolutely not meant to be a video to say no one should use elastics always use what works for you kind of in the same vein if you see other people's videos blogs posts or whatever about his
torical hairstyles please don't comment on them saying that they should try it without using elastics because morgan said so because no that is that is absolutely not the intent of this video this is just me having fun trying things out and seeing what works well for me and hoping that some other people might appreciate that that said if you do end up wanting to try some elastic-less hairstyles and show them off online a good hashtag from what i can tell would be elastic lists it seems like it's
not really in use and might be a good way for us to share what each of us have found works best on our own hairstyles i find that any time somebody else tries a thing they're going to put their own spin on it and find slightly different variances that work better for them their hairstyle their ribbon their what have you and i'm excited to see what you guys come up with so thank you so much for watching i hope you have an awesome day hello from editing morgan rockin the bun today i was so excite
d to share the hair things with you that i didn't even get to some of the really really cool folks who have done some really neat work in the field of historical hair like of course janet stevens has been a huge influence into how i think about hair and so many others so i'm going to try and link to a bunch below check them out if this is something that interests you
Comments