Long hair on men in fashion?

Well, I suppose when I write “long” I mean about shoulder length which is usually considered long to everyone else but is rather short if you’re in the longhair circuit.

It seems I’m seeing more and more longhaired men wearing their hair in a knot.

I absolutely approve of this trend!

The dominant style seems to be slightly choppy/layered shoulder length hair in a ponytail pulled half through and halfway bunned so the result is slightly messy and more like a knot. Without a handful of glossy gel, it leans more to a warrior knot than that slicked 80es drug dealer-look.

It really reminds me of some ancient warrior’s hair: Rugged and hard to tame so it’s swept back in the sturdiest style they have at hand. The dark haired versions I’ve seen so far has a definite look of samurai top knot to them. The lighter versions reminds me more of a half made Suebian knot. But since it’s kept relatively short (Haven’t yet spotted any guy wearing a knot that would have longer than top of shoulder blade-length hair) and low in the back of the head it doesn’t cross over in Sikh-territory. 


Hah, I’m not the only one who realised it’s a trend: Link, link and link. 


I see there is some controversy on calling it “buns”. I suggest “knot” instead of bun. At least on what I have seen being popular around me; it really isn’t a fully formed bun.

Never dated one though. I had my eyes on one once: Tall, intelligent, interesting and funny IT engineer student with mid back length blonde hair. But at the time I was in another relationship. When we broke up, the long haired guy had just cut his hair! It was the only time I ever found myself being disappointed or annoyed that someone had cut their hair.

Since I at that time was at a university in Denmark that produced various forms of engineers, I was surrounded by tall, intelligent, interesting and funny engineering students with blonde hair. The long haired guy stood out. Then he cut it. Meh, it’s not my place to judge people for what they do to their hair, but I was still disappointed that day.

Of course it wasn’t the hair I was interested in, but shortly after I found myself in a relationship with a different tall, intelligent, interesting and funny IT engineer who was going bald but still had short blonde hair.


Here is some eye candy for everyone: Sites dedicated solely to men with long hair!
Link
Link
Link
Link


Well, boring blah-blah aside, I definitely approve of this trend and I definitely approve of longhaired men! Yum.

Wants and random hair chatter

I have injured my right shoulder somehow. It’s very mysterious! I woke up to being unable to lift my right arm upwards and back and unable to rotate my hand inwards while stretching out (Aka the pouring motion I did with my milk for my cereal)

Of course my question is: How the hell did I manage to do that in my sleep??

Since I’m dominantly right-handed this means no gym and no deep conditioning for me today, yikes!

Window-shopping to cheer myself up?

   

    

Pretty Anntoinet’s has two new loc covers that I find myself eyeing. The olive would be a horrible choice for my colouring, but the solid black one…? Hmm.

     

    

New beanies too in burgundy and grey. I do wear a lot of grey so maybe I should treat myself to one of those too?

    

     

Maybe a few headbands to go with that?

     

   

I tried to help with a Flexi 8 sizing question on Facebook and found myself thinking about getting a few extra large ones to hold my Figure 8 buns. My megaflexies are really too big to hold the bun as stabile as I would like.

Of course my problem with the Flexies is (Other than the fact that they have been really rude to me) that it’s hard to judge the quality of the beads online. For instance, when looking at the XL page they have two clips right next to each other that I have previously owned or currently owned: The Native inspired filigree with jade heart beadwork.

    

   

and the Lovely circle stone-set in emerald green with matching bead. 

    

   

Online they look about the same but in real life there is a huge difference. The second one looks completely cheap and almost childlike with plastic beads where the first one has stones that look like real, actual gemstones and not just plastic.

The prettiest Flexi I’ve ever encountered is the Intricate soaring butterfly with purple-iris metallic beads but that one really doesn’t look impressive online either. In real life it has a metallic kind of sheen on the beads that looks really stunning.

Its fun to window shop… However think my next hairtool purchase will be at Quattro. 

I never got a hair fork to work for me before, but I have the feeling that the skinny, yet strong Ron Quattro forks might do the trick for me. Ordinary forks are too thick and don’t offer the flexibility I need to force two “sticks” through my buns while remaining parallel.

Besides, I really need more Hubby Safe ™ hair tools! When I say Hubby Safe ™ I mean something my moronic hubby won’t poke himself in the face or eyes on. He has the memory of a moth when it comes to remembering I have sharp objects in my hair.

    

     

Unpleasant revelations

I’d like to take a short break from the usual hair-chatter and talk about something that has been on my mind for a long time.

Hubby and I have been dieting for at least a year now. We both have a real case of “relationship gut” and haven’t been able to get it to go away.

I’ve always been on the skinny side. As a child I was fit-skinny and later as a student and even later when working flabby-skinny from too much time spent stationary. I have small bones and am built to be slender like everyone else in my mothers’ side of the family.

When I met hubby I quickly packed on about 10 kg. The first 5 was a good thing though since I had gotten too skinny, but the rest went to all the bad places.

I have a really narrow window where I feel happy with my body and I look harmonious: 55 to 58 kg. Below my hipbones and chest bones start poking out (My lowest as an adult was less than 52 kg) above that and extra fat goes to love handles and upper thighs, nowhere else.

Anyways.

When hubby and I realised how much weight we had both gained and how unhappy it made us both, we started training and going on diets. Nothing really had an impact though. Even when I went to the gym almost religiously, my fat reserves stayed the same; I just gained some muscles and endurance. It was really discouraging!

After a year of training and on/off dieting, we still hadn’t gotten our old bodies back.

Fast forward to last week.

Hubby and I have the arrangement that he pays our bills using his net bank. Then I match the amount and put it in a wallet in cash. We were supposed to use that as a food wallet and be able to live off that for the month, but we had problems with it for a long time.

Last week we found the food wallet completely empty, not even two weeks into the month!

We naturally assumed we had accidentally dropped some money or had taken some cash out of it for something non-food and forgotten to put it back. So we started going through our paper trash for the receipts we could find and doing the math.

Even though we couldn’t find all the receipts, it spoke its own clear language:

We had been getting groceries at least once a day.

And we had been buying “extra” crap every single time!

There is was, clear as day in black and white why we weren’t losing weight: A bag of chips, cookies, an ice-cream cake, a bag of liquorish, chocolate… On every single purchase, no matter how small, we had bought some extra goodie for us. Hubby added it all up and found we had spent over a quarter of the food wallet money on candy, cakes and chips!

This was why we had used up the food wallet money and this was exactly why we weren’t losing weight!

With all the training and all the dieting we had done, we had still brought home unhealthy crap food day in day out to undo all our work.

It was such an unpleasant revelation that this was exactly why we didn’t get any results. I guess we both felt like wanting to “spoil” each other and cosy up with some goodies and it completely slipped our minds how much we were ruining with it.

Now I feel like my grandmother who always whined how she couldn’t lose any weight no matter what she did or ate, and I always mentally rolled my eyes at her and wanted to tell her that was physically, chemically and biologically impossible! 

How could we both have been so blind? So much in denial of the hundreds of calories extra we ate every single day? How much money we had spent on crap?

At least the revelation was so shocking that I think it has efficiently cured us of such bad habits.

Thanks for listening! And let’s now get back to the hair-chatter…

Leave in vs. Rinse out

I really enjoy The Beauty Brains blog. It’s a wonderful place to debunk stupid beauty myths and learn new things.

I found this one interesting: Is it okay to use rinse out conditioner as a leave-on?

I know some people can get a diluted rinse out-product to work as a leave in product, but I never got it to work myself. (Well, I tried a lot of “weird” stuff when I was new to the longhair circuit. A lot of things I wouldn’t recommend anyone as well.) For me it always ended in greasy hair and irritated scalp. Well, here is the explanation for it…

Funny of the day

Top knot

I tried a cinnamon bun top knot for the party. It started slipping and pulling after a few hours, booh. I think my bun is simply too large to make a simple cinnamon bun work anymore, I need to braid it or do a nautilus to keep it from slipping.

                          

The cheap and picky longhair is being cheap and picky?

I was running low on leave in conditioner so I had to go shopping for it. Of course the problem was that stupid H&M in the city had stopped carrying my usual Sunsilk leave in conditioner and when I asked, was told they would never stock it again. Augh!

I wasn’t feeling in the mood to go to Nova (Mall in the other end of Lund) just for leave in conditioner so I decided to look around and see if I could find an alternative.

That turned out to be a lot more work than I expected. After some searching through 100, 200 and 300 kronor bottles I finally gave up and got 2 bottles of 50 ml each at Åhlens. 40 kronor each, down from 80! Wow, what a bargain!

Not.

It looked like just plain old expensive silicone drops. What a disappointment.

Even crankier than before I decided to try the stylist around the corner called Delal. The guy there argued for me trying what looked more like a styling cream than the leave in conditioner I asked for. 169 kronor for 150 ml. Uff!

In a moment of madness I went to check at H&M and O…M…G…

They had my trusty old Sunsilk leave in conditioner?!

Baby, don’t ever leave me again!

   

    

I returned the expensive styling cream thing and got some attitude from the guy which I absolutely did not appreciate.

Under normal circumstances I might have kept the expensive product, but I was getting pretty tired and cranky over the ridiculous prices…

Look at this:

The big bottles costs as much as the little ones, after the little ones have had 50% off the price. And the little bottles are just simple uncomplicated silicone drops! Bleah!

      

Today’s hair

Or lack thereof?

Wore my fake bangs today under a beanie today. They feel a bit too thick for my taste but I guess my main issue is that every time I see myself wearing the piece I keep thinking “Dude, where’s my eyebrows?”

   

    

Fish oil FTW

I have taken fish oil again for just 5 days since my order arrived and I can really see a difference in my skin! I know omega 3 has an anti inflammatory effect so I guess that, in combination with correcting the fatty acid balance in the skin (That I read about here) have had a real impact on my skin.

I’m really impressed by how quickly it has been too: I can tell a difference after just 5 days at my normal dosage of 1 gram of fish oil (336 mg omega 3 fatty acids)

For a while I wondered if it was a placebo effect but I’m 99% sure that it isn’t.

One thing I find myself wondering: With all the crappy, obvious, insane, potentially damaging, ridiculous and just plain stupid skin care advice I’ve received through my life, why haven’t anyone ever told me about this?

Attempted top knot

I’ve been thinking ahead for the party on Saturday (Kinda a delayed birthday party for me) and since the top knot seems to still rule the fashion world I figured maybe I should try a test knot.

I was thinking I would go for a rope braided Nautilus for my top knot instead of the sleek or messy knots that seems to be the It Thing.

The finished result
    

First I did a high ponytail. This turned out to be a real headache as my hair absolutely hates changes of directions. It comes with the territory of having coarse hair. My hair doesn’t “slide” smoothly against itself; it tangles if you try to direct it in another way. It took me something like 15 minutes to create a slightly-higher-than-normal ponytail, argh!

My left triceps was burning! I use my right hand to comb and the left to hold, so I had my left arm stuck in an uncomfortable position trying to hold my heavy, damp hair in place. Ouch!

In 20/20 hindsight, the way to go for this step is definitely to bend at the hip and tilt forwards instead of combing upwards. I might try this tomorrow.
     

Now for the rope braid. Hm. Not impressed. Again, 20/20 hindsight tells me to bend forwards next time. I had trouble feeling what I was doing and I couldn’t see it either. Ropebraids have never been a friend of mine so maybe I should just go for a simple braid instead?
 

Front view after turning the rope braid into a Nautilus. It got a bit asymmetrical. Hm.

So what do you all think?

I think it has potential. I think if I practise this a few more times it could be a cool style for me. I like the position of the bun actually. The “lift” is a nice touch and the rope bun is pretty cool. The question is if it would work with a braid too or only rope braids. I doubt I will ever make friends with those #¤%£$ things…