I recently got an email about brides wearing bangs, asking if I thought it was a good look. Yes, I do! But I don’t know if I’m the type of girl who says you should completely avoid dating your wedding. I mean, it will be kind of fun to look back at the pictures and know know that what you wore was what you wanted, instead of not wearing what you wanted because you were too afraid of the occasion being dated. I wore my hair long, down and wavy with a nod to the 1940s (with sort of a victory roll on the side). I also wore a big champagne colored sash which will forever go down in 2007 wedding history. The point is, it was what I wanted to wear. (Actually, I got married in Vegas and it was the only dress I tried on. But I did my hair myself and I did like it.)

So, maybe sweepy bangs wont be around forever. Maybe you have Zooey Deschanel hair and that wont be around forever either. But if you love your bangs, and you don’t feel like yourself without them, you should just wear the bangs.

But..

..If you are afraid of looking like you are hiding under your big heavy bangs in all the pictures, then maybe you should try curtain bangs. Which is basically the beautiful bangs you already have, just parted down the center. You’ll have the comfort of the bangs that you know and love, but you will also be able to see your forehead!

So I know none of these above ladies are brides at the moment, but I do know that they all have the beautiful “curtain bang” that I love so much. I wear curtain bangs whenever they get too long to wear all the way down. They’ve been too long for that for several months, and I’ve enjoyed so much the curtain look.

I am interested to hear if you wore bangs to your wedding. Or if you will. My friend Maggie has had bangs as long as I’ve known her (6th grade) and she is getting married in just a few months. I am so curious what she’ll do with her bangs. Frankly, I can’t picture her without them!

PS this question came from Bosnia! Crazy!

I wore my hair in a bun for 4 days straight. On Monday, I didn’t have time to shampoo, but I could not wear a bun on top of my head another day because it was hurting. A few of you have emailed me about your hurty buns, so I know I’m not the only one out there with this problem! So, since my hair was such a fright that I couldn’t wear it down, I decided to go with the off centered top knot. It was cute and gave the top center part of my head/hair a rest. The next morning I shampooed my hair for a very long time and told it sorry for doing too many back to back buns.

Would you do an off centered top knot? For some reason it reminds me of the Tinman’s hair style, which always makes me laugh super hard.

I was catching up on a photo blog that I love, called Altamira:Models off duty, when I saw this picture of supermodel Alana Zimmer. It was taken in the middle of July, just a few weeks before I cut about 3 or 4 inches off of her hair! Models are constantly having their hair done for shoots/shows, and it’s hard to keep it healthy with all the heat styling. Alana wanted to get the dry guys off the ends to keep it fresh and ship-shaped. She looks beautiful with her healthy in-between length hair.

Along with being super tall and even super-y beautiful, Alana is also perfectly sweet and spunky. Here are a few pictures of some of the gorgeous work she’s done.

 Want to know the trick to cutting a model’s hair? Keep the cut as natural as possible with very few layers and lots of dry cutting to soften the ends up. Alana told me it took her years to grow out her bangs because they kept having to be cut at shoots. This is what my friend Anna has experienced with her bob. Everytime she gets it past her shoulders, her agency or a client makes her cut it. I guess that is what you get for looking so hot with a bob.

Top photo
All other photos

Recently when I did the Half Up and Full Up Fat Twist tutorials, I told you that I’d do a hair pin tutorial. They are really great alternatives to bobby pins, and they don’t give you as much of a headache! So, we did this quick little video last night to show those of you who couldn’t figure out the pin situation.

Remember, this is a Hair Pin tutorial! If it had been a bun tutorial, I would have spent a little more time making it look nice. Haha

PS we didn’t go to DC.

Tonight (or tomorrow, depending on Irene) we are head to DC! We are going to see 4 of some of our very good friends. I’m so excited.

And hopefully you are excited too, because we’re planning some tutorials for the weekend! I’ve confirmed with Maggie that she’ll model for me, and now I just need to ask Kat, who was the very first toot model I ever used on the blog! Remember the 50s waves and the flat iron curls?

Here is what we are hoping to film!

The 3/4 Halo

The 5 stranded frenchie

And the Tony Hair Updo.

These are some of my prettiest/favorite braids. I’m hoping we can film at least two of these…since you know, it’s supposed to sort of be a vacation.

Cool, have a great weekend Hairies! And THANK YOU for being so sweet about our video. We love it and we love that you all love it!

(PS Jen really is my muse. She was in almost every picture in this post!)

On Monday Jake, our friend Tadd and I filmed this video. Tadd is a scientist and has this crazy camera that films 1,000 frames per second (or something. that’s what i overheard them saying), so you can see every little detail of the shot. Usually Tadd films bullets being shot under water so that he can study the fluid dynamics (also what i overheard) and sciency things of that sort, but we decided to focus on hair for the night!

Here is what we came up with!

Slow Hair from Jacob Breinholt on Vimeo.

I recently got an email with a question that really had me thinking. She was wondering how I “got so good at hair”. This question had me experience severe flattery syndrome.

But more important than posting this question so that you can all see that someone thinks I’m “so good at hair”, I thought it was actually a really good question to answer for you aspiring stylists. It could even be good for someone struggling in any career field.

Here it goes:

I started out beauty school interested in hair, but not really having any idea of where it could take me. I was in for a rude awakening when I graduated and I didn’t have a full clientele immediately. I spent a long time just doing hair on the side because I wasn’t making enough money, and I had to rely on waitressing as my real source of income. When I moved to NYC, I found out that you can’t work on the cutting floor without assisting experience. I thought I knew so much about hair, but in truth, I wasn’t sectioning the hair off right, I didn’t know the difference between a stationary blade and a moving blade, and there was so much terminology I had never even heard of when it came to hair. I was embarrassed and it took a lot of pride swallowing to realize that beauty school doesn’t count as experience in NYC. Most people assist for 2 or 3 years before getting on the floor.

I chose cutting/styling over color. I still can’t really explain why I did, but I’m glad. There is definitely more money in color, but cutting/styling feels a little more creative. I worked my ass off. I cried, I messed up a few haircuts, I got laughed at by my teacher and I worked terrible long hours handing people hairspray and shampooing clients for the real stylists. I spent so much time leaning over shampoo bowls, that I had to get weekly back adjustments by a chiropractor. But I also learned a lot. I learned which blade was my moving blade, how to section off for different haircuts/head shapes and most importantly I was in an environment that challenged and inspired me.

I still feel insecure sometimes when I watch some of the stylists I work with. I wonder if I’m that good or if I’m that professional, but I think that a little of that is important in any work environment. What if I didn’t feel slightly insecure? I’d go to work every day bored, not trying new things, not looking for constant inspiration. I don’t feel afraid of looking stupid, if a stylist I work with knows more than me, I ask them to teach me. We all have our own styles and we can all learn something from each other. I look through magazines, I play with my friends’ hair, I watch old movies and use what I already know to come up with new things.

Something I’ve learned over the years….especially since I spent over three years in a salon that didn’t challenge or inspire me…is that your talent/creativity will become dormant if you aren’t pushing yourself. If you go to work and cut/blow, cut/blow, cut/blow, without any variation, you will never grow. If you have an extra 15 minutes with client, ask if you can try a new bun or braid on them that you saw in a magazine. You’ll find out that hair is the most fun think that ever was.

Comment number 192 who is……

Congratulations Sharon! Email me your address and I’ll send this right on over! Keep on “liking” my facebook page and I’ll keept doing the giveaways!

On Saturday Jake had to run 20 miles for his marathon training. Sometimes I run marathons too, but right now I’m not feeling it at all. I let Jake have fun on his 3 hour run while Jen and I went to the Food Truck Festival in Southstreet Seaport. I love having a friend who eats all the same things I do, because that means that since we are sharing, we can try out double the food trucks, but split the calories/cost in half. Smarties we are. I’m sure no one on the face of the Earth has ever thought of sharing food before.

So, here we are with my first ever Lobster Roll. It was wonderful. Gourmet food trucks are kind of a trend right now in NYC (everywhere?) and I love it! This food truck ships their lobster fresh from Maine. Not a bad first LobRoll.

There were dozens and dozens of trucks, but it was hard to get a good shot. Here are a few!

I love to tie a scarf in a bow on my head during the summer. I do it now and then when the dirtiness of my hair isn’t fooling anyone.

So, while it might seem like my weekend achievement was downing a LobRoll, it was actually creating a beautiful 5 strand french braid on Jen. I plan on doing a tutorial for this, but keep in mind this is even harder to do than the Halo Braid….well, the french part. Once you are no longer frenching 5 strands, it’s quite doable. But the french part has me swearing and hushing anyone in the room who might be distracting my tangled fingers.

The 5 strander is really quite lovely though. I was pretty excited to run over to the blog to show all my hairies!

This picture is so edited (Instagram!) that you can’t really see the true color, but I went pinker! This is definitely a semi-perm color, because it came from a shampoo! Niles from my work, who is a color assistant, asked me if he could try this pastel shampoo on me to see how my hair would take it.

It really really took it. The pink is beautiful, but it is so bright, that I feel like the natural looking roots don’t really marry with the bottom. It’s like Little Orphan Annie on top and My Little Pony Tales on the bottom. But I’m crazy and I’ll try anything so I don’t care. In fact, I really like having pink hair. And people on the street want to talk to me…well girls. This is definitely a man-repelling hair procedure. Which I don’t mind because Jake loves me for the crazy pants that I am.

I’m anxious to see how long this pink lasts. I’ll make sure to give you a full review of the process! And some better pictures soon too!

Tonight I’m going to pick a giveaway winner, so hurry and enter!

One commenter said she should win because her “hair is gross” and for some reason that had me laughing for 3 hours. I like a simple explanation like that.

Good luck y’all!