During Contemporary Final Assessment

This is what my wig look like after it had dried.

I removed all of the rollers and brushed the hair with a paddle brush and I was pleased with the structure of the hair afterwards.

I then styled my wig. I put the roll in the front section of hair first and used grips the same colour as the wig to keep it in place. I then swepped the hair at the back over the the side and secured it with a hairband. After this I wrapped a small section of hair around the hairband to hide it and pinned this piece of hair in place. I backcombed the hair in the ponytail and then gripped the hair above the ponytail in line with the roll at the front of the hair. I gripped small sections at a time and tried to blend the hair into the roll at the front. I also tried to angle the hair slightly so that the structure wrapped around the head as I thought this looked more flattering than the structure being a completely straight line.

I then folded the hair over the grips to create a roll structure and used pins to secure it. I tried to blend all the sections together to become one structure and tried to keep the hair as smooth and sleek as possible. Then I shaped the fringe to also blend in with the roll and used hairspray to set the look and to try and smooth the flyaway hair. I forgot to take photographs of the finished wig when it was on the block but you can see the finished look on my model in the photographs above.

To prepare my model's hair for the wig I put pincurls in the front of her hair so that I could use them as an anchor point to secure the wig. I then put to french plaits in the back of her hair to keep it as flat as possible and wrapped them around her head. I secured everything with grips. I then placed a stocking cap on her head which was a similar colour to the wig- perhaps a little bit light in colour. I secured this with pins.

Before I put the wig on I completed my models make-up and she also go changed into the dress. I wanted a natural base for the make-up as a fresh faced look was popular in the 1940's as it is today. Red lips also became iconic from the 1940's and are still popular today so I just added a purple tone to the red to make it a bit more modern. I think this colour works well with both the colour of the dress and the colour of the hair because of the darker tone I added to the red. On the eyes I used gold to go with the gold on the dress buttons and I used grey tones in the outer corner to define the eye. In the 1940's the eyes were defined but it looked more natural but today we use a lot darker and heavier make-up on the eyes so I tried to combine both. If I did this look again I would probably use  slightly darker colours on the eyes and more eyeliner as I think the eye area does get lost slightly in the over all look. I defined the cheeks with a colour that could of been used in the 1940's and that is used today. I could of maybe used more contouring around other facial features such as the nose to make the look a bit more dramatic ad modern.

I chose the dress because I thought the colour was similar to the colour of some of the uniforms women wore in the 1940's especially during the war. Also the high collared neck line with the buttons on the blouse reminded me of the era as did the style of the sleeves. The tie around the waste is quite modern yet it pulls in the waist which was a style used in the 1940's.

Setting Wig For Contemporary Assessment

After my historical assessment I secured the wig back onto the block using pins and brushed the hair through. I then put a strong side parting in the hair and brushed the fringe forwards.

I tried a couple of different rolls in the hair as I was not sure if it would look better and work better with one or two rolls. I found it was a lot easier putting one roll in the hair because their was more hair to create a strong, thick roll so that is what I chose to do for the assessment.

I then sectioned off the front of the hair and started putting rollers in it. As I wanted the roll in the hair to be on one side I put the rollers going in the direction towards the side I wanted the roll and then on the side on the roll I did a couple of rollers going backwards to try and get good structure in the hair for creating the roll.

In the back of the hair I then used a Brick work pattern as I wanted to create the same structure as I did for my historical assessment as I found the hair good to work with when it had been set like this. I then used a steamer over the hair and left it to dry for a few days.

Setting Wig for Historical Assessment

The decade I have chosen is the 1940's. In this decade the length of women’s hair was often past their shoulders but not extremely long as they needed to be able to easily put it up and out of the way. This was especially important at the beginning of the decade when the war was still going on and the hair needed to be styled so that it did not get caught in machinery when the women were working in factories.

My wig was very long and not only did this not suit the 1940’s hairstyles I was designing but also the hair at the bottom of the wig was a lot thinner and therefore did not look as good as the rest of the wig. Therefore it needed cutting and my friend Lily very kindly offered to cut it for me. I was going to cut it myself but as Lily is a trained hairdresser I accepted the offer as I knew she would do a lot better job than I would be able to and I was very pleased with the results. The photographs above show my wig before and after it was cut, thank you Lily!  

The first thing I did to prepare my wig for the assessment was to section off the front of the hair that would be used for the curls at the sides. I then put in an off centre parting and put rollers in going in the direction away from the parting. I used medium sized rollers as I thought this would create a nice size of curl especially at the ends of the hair. At the sides I had the rollers going backwards to try and create curls and movement in the hair that would look good when shaped and pinned in place.

The wig had several layers in it especially at the front so I found it quite difficult to make the hair stay on the rollers and not fall off the sides. Therefore I used pins to stop the hair moving and to help keep the rollers themselves in the right place.

At the back of the hair I did the rollers in a brick work pattern to create 1940's style curls that would give me a good texture to work with. The rollers at the top are smaller because for my design I wanted to have nice curls that I could pin into place to be decorative. The rollers at the very top of the brick work are at a slightly different angle because the hair of the wig was shorter and difficult to roller horizontally. At the bottom of the hair is where the padding was going to be so I did not need the top of this section of hair to be curly so I used bigger rollers.

These are a few more photographs from after I had set my wig. Then I used a streamer which heats the hair to help set it and also as the hair dries it sets into the curls around the rollers. I steamed the hair thoroughly making sure all of it was wet so that there was not any hair that's' structure was not changed.

I left the hair to dry for several days and then took the rollers out to check that the hair had set properly how I wanted it to and it had. I made sure that the front section was still separated from the back so that the curls did not get mixed together and it was ready for my assessment.