Today’s hair

Rope braided Nautilus bun.

I’m really not on friendly terms with the ropebraid. I feel I can never get it “packed” as tightly and firmly as I want my braids to be and it doesn’t have the same stabilising feel as a regular braid put up has.

I think the end result looks fairly nice although I’ll admit I shamelessly took the picture from the best angle and side!

Now I just need to keep myself from messing around with it.
Do… Not…Touch…The…Updo!!

  

Shampooed

I went to bed last night with super greasy hair. Decided I just couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.

I woke up to something really upsetting. Those who are members at UTT can read about it here.

After things had been “solved” I headed for the shower to clean the grease ball. It felt like such a huge task to clean the disgusting mess with conditioner only!

  

So for the first time this year, I reached for a bottle of shampoo.

   

I went with Franck Provost because it looked cone free. I’ll admit I’m not an ingredient expert, but what I could see it didn’t contain any.

I figured using a cone free shampoo followed with a heavy deep treatment would work well.

  

  

My hair felt awful after the shampoo! Dry, cranky and tangly.

It made me realise why they put cones in shampoo and wonder how I could shampoo my hair 2-3 times a week and think it felt good!

   

  

Then I mixed up a treatment using some leftovers: Garnier Respons with avocado oil and shea butter (Far right) and Elvital volume collagen

  

   

And filling up with a bit of Franck Provost expert repair conditioner. Left it in a Sexysmurf for about two hours.

   

My hair felt really good afterwards, but I’ll have to keep an eye on my scalp to see how it reacts!

The comb search goes on

It’s been a week since I emailed Creative combs about their failure of a website and inability to ship an order. They haven’t responded at all, so I’m going to order combs from the place that Forgetful recommended: Hairsense.

Even though my intension was to order combs, I find myself tempted by

A massage brush. Would this be useful for washing maybe?

And the natural bristle brushes. I never owned a real quality brush and the natural bristle brushes always seem to be highly praised.

I like the looks of this handle rake, but it's really big. Almost the size of my Ric the Combmaker comb that feels huge, almost unmanageable.

This one is slightly smaller and looks more handy.

And this super detangle rake is even larger than the Ric-comb! It looks like it could be a useful one for shower-purposes and distributing conditioners.

This handle rake and this detangler would be useful as a comb for putting my hair up.

This one would maybe work well to be used in the shower for distributing conditioner. Or would it be too wide-toothed to work at all? Does anyone have experience with the super wide-toothed combs? I think I’ll put a thread up on UTT asking for experiences…

Well, that didn’t go as planned…

My scalp continues to be flaky and irritating. I must admit I don’t entirely understand it: It’s been so rainy and wet outside for weeks that even with the heat cranked up inside, the moisture should still seep in, right? My scalp shouldn’t be suffering from a dry climate, should it? It’s not that cold outside either, yet.

I don’t get it.

Anyways. I thought I was clever last night: Instead of CO washing to get the damned flakes off; I decided to do a scritching. That seems to be the most commonly used term for manipulating the dry scalp to loosen up scalp gunk. So using my fingertips, comb, brush, fingernails and this “octopus” massage thingie I cleaned my scalp of the flakes before brushing them out of the length.

I felt really clever.

Today my scalp is intensely greasy. Yep. Figures: The long manipulation yesterday really stimulated it to release sebum. So now I can either make peace with being a total greaseball, or I can do the wash I was hoping to avoid.

Touché, scalp.
     

I love getting mail :)

Seriously, receiving a package in the mail feels like getting a visit from this guy:

 

 

Doesn’t matter much what the package actually contains ^^ Still feels like Christmas

  

Well, my mailbox today contained this

  

The secret item will remain secret because it’s going to someone I know reads my blog and I don’t want to ruin the surprise!

    

   

The little box on the right contains a bunch of the cards shown in the front and the red thingie is a stamper thing with “Betald”- the Swedish word for “paid” that I figured we could use for bills XD

   

    

I love the cards with the beautiful design made by the very talented Madison!

   

    

Had to stick one of the stickers on the first best thing XD

  

  

I’m pissed off at the crappy job they did with the pens. On the website with their design tool it showed the design being wrapped entirely around the pen and taking up all the white area. In real life though… Bleargh! 

Snugly warm winter head of the day

I had a bunch of errands to run and it’s cold, wet and windy outside so I needed to keep my head warm.

   

  

Hair up in a braided nautilus

Then I put a pre-tied bandanna over it

I intended it only as an extra layer, but it turned out to be really great for keeping the hat from sliding back or budging in the whipping wind. I see the point of an underscarf for a hat!

Even though this blue one is the beanie I feel fit over my head and bun the best, it still looks really weird. I guess normal hats just aren’t meant to conceal a cantaloupe-sized bun? Hah

It does get better once I get a coat and my headphones on though

I kept warm and comfortable so I will definitely do this again!  

Testing

Apologies for the very lame upload, but since it’s my first try with creating videos and uploading them to Youtube, I thought I would give it a very simple test run to get used to how things work.

Hair happiness graph

A rather random and geeky little thing I made yesterday while chatting with Little Orca.

Not entirely sure how much explanation it requires but…

• I liked the short hair on me. 5 o clock shadow to eyebrow length looked really good. It still took some product and shampooing every night, but it was a good-looking length.
• Then it started to lie down in weird patches and falling into my eyes, nose and mouth and it required constant gelling or headbands to not drive me insane. Argh!
• Once it hit flip length and was long enough to be whipped up in a ponytail and I could easily get it out of my face, my happiness with it kept increasing.
• Then I hit about mid thigh and outgrew my reach. Huge drop in happiness that I didn’t see coming at all! It made my handling so much more difficult and I had to adapt to it.
• My conclusion on outgrowing “Reach Length” was that it doesn’t matter if my hair is 2 cm or 20 cm longer than I can reach; it makes all handling and care a lot more difficult. But now that I have gotten used to it, my happiness with my hair is slowly increasing again.

(I guess I should include a small “jump” now that I’ve reached the illusive knee length. Classic to knee has been really slow and frustrating)

    

Tuesday very early morning

Just had a total girly hour with mud mask, wax, eyelash dye and some fun with the hot pink dye I got from Umphie. I put a bit of coconut oil in my hair yesterday and just let the leftovers rinse out. It feels soft and nice too.

I placed the order at vistaprint for business cards with my blog address and a few other things some days ago. I’m extremely unimpressed with the company and the ordering process and wont be ordering with them ever again no matter how well the result turns out. I have a strong dislike for hidden fees and feeling lied to. Of course they make it sound so easy in the ads but in reality, you have to pay extra for anything and everything. It even cost extra to use your own design! Why, I can’t figure out. I know I’m not in the printing business, but I can’t see why my own design would be more difficult or costly to print than the ones you just fill contact information in. It has to be the same number of colours/ink you use and you have to re-set the entire thing after each print, right? Weird. I probably won’t receive them until after Christmas: I was so fed up with the hidden fees upon hidden fees upon hidden fees that I opted for the cheapest processing and shipping. Bah, they can kiss my behind.

I have been trying to make videos for my new youtube channel, but can’t figure it out. I “shoot” the video just fine, but when I try to edit it in windows movie maker the entire video is black/blank even though it plays perfectly fine anywhere else. It’s very strange and super frustrating! Of course there is no help to find anywhere online, argh.

I’m going to place an order with the place that Julya recommended, Creative hair tools:

This one

And this one

And this one too even though they don’t write how large it is. It looks like the kind of wide toothed comb I want, but it could be very, very small. Well, if it is, it will go in my shoulder bag. I could use having a good comb with me.

Also going to order the argan oil they have on the site.

Edit: Well, Creative hair tools turned out to be a big fat fail. When I’m checking out, I get the message:

"You Spent Over $50. Click Here for Free Shipping.

This shipping method is currently unavailable. If you would like to ship using this shipping method, please contact us."

But I can’t pick free shipping and I can’t pick any other option at all. I have no problem in paying for shipping but I do have a big problem with irritating and useless websites.
I sent them an email even though I honestly don’t feel like bothering and would rather order from another place now.

Today I feel like Goldilocks

Hubby and I were going to a Christmas dinner with some friends. I wanted to do something cool to my hair instead of the usual braided Nautilus bun held with a Flexi that it’s always in. So I decided on a figure 8 bun held with one of my cooler hair sticks.

So, it went up in a figure 8 bun and I stuck a Timberstone Turnings stick I got from Hypnotica in. It is so big it kept either poking me in the neck or poking up like a giant weird antenna. Hm.

  

   

I decided against it and put in a hair sword I got from Fatamorganna. That one kept poking me in the neck too and it’s pretty sharp! I angled it more after taking the picture and then it wasn’t Hubby-safe anymore. He has the memory of a moth circling a flame when it comes to remembering I have sharp things in my hair!

  

   

I liked the idea of a hairsword though and took a wooden one I also got from Hypnotica. That felt more right. It’s not any sharper than a hairstick so the poking in my neck was tolerable and it was relatively Hubby-safe too.

  

  

But after taking the picture, I tried adjusting it a little and…

*Crack*

Dammit.

   

  

Okay. Sigh. In went that Flexi that I had tried to avoid.

   

  

And finally, a woollen hat over to protect my hair and scalp from the sun, wind and cold.