Copper

I love how sunlight brings out the copper tones in my hair...

New length shot

A classmate took this very awesome picture of me. I thought it was pretty cool how my ends almost brush the floor when I sit on this bench!

Cranky.

I’m packing up to be away for about two weeks. It will more than double the time Hubby and I have spent apart over the past 3½ years or so. 

Sigh. I miss my Hubby and my home already.

I will try to blog, but I’ll probably be busy with school and family stuff. 

The trouble with trimming

There are certain advantages to going trim free: Not actually having to worry about trimming.

Hah.

For most people this wouldn’t even be something they would think about, but some things actually do become more difficult when you have super long hair.

I don’t trust stylists. At all.

Sure, I haven’t actually experienced any incidents where a stylist chops off a bunch of your hair, but I have seen how they absolutely couldn’t show the true 2 cm even if you handed them a ruler and put a gun to their heads.

(I do however find that having my hubby sitting behind me glaring holes through the stylist’s skull makes them a whole lot more accurate.)

I thought I could get my hubby to trim my hair for me. A lot of the super longhairs seems to eventually talk their significant others into trimming their hair.

But after years of trying and lots of praising him for his work, he reacts to any hint of me wanting a trim by breaking out in cold sweat.

Honestly I prefer his nervous reaction over any stylist ever:

“Ow crap what if I take off too much?!” vs “Sweet! A blank canvas for my sick skills!!”

Not a difficult choice.

But as I wrote already: After years of trying, he is still incredibly scared of messing a trim up and will try to get out of it.

I teased him with it and asked him “Do you know how many people would pay to get to trim my hair?” and without even looking up from his book he replied “And exactly how much would it creep you out if the guy trimming your hair was breathing funnily and rubbing his boner on you?”

…

Good point.

Excellent point.

He then lifted his eyes from his book and said “Why don’t you get one of your girlfriends to do it?”.

Well, I have honestly never really talked much hair in that way with my girlfriends.

In fact I generally try to stay off the topic of hair around my friends. A lot of people are just being politely curious about hair around me and I know how irritating it is when someone confuses polite curiosity with “Please lecture me about this”. Besides, I know I come off as a giant smartass and know-it-all since, well, I do know it all when it comes to hair.

Some time passed and I happened to get into a discussion (Well, more that we agreed that stylists are irritating) about haircuts with a classmate. She has the most fantastic curls and at her last haircut, the stylist had straightened her hair which aged her about 30 years. Seriously. I saw the picture.

I told her how much it annoys me when they make a big fat fuss about cutting a straight line 2 cm higher up than the longest ends and she offered me to help.

Score!

Then we got to talk about how that would work best. As she pointed out: Even when I’m standing up, she would have to crawl around on the floor.

The school has a creepy dungeon-like basement wherein there lies a 50s fallout shelter-style shower room, complete with benches bolted to the floor.

She suggested I stand up on one of those and then she can sit behind me comfortably.

It was an excellent idea.

So, now I just need to remember to bring a scissor to school about once every two months or so… 

Floppy donkey ears

I left my hair in the vertical double braids for two days (Well, I was lazy!) and it allowed my short pieces to fall out everywhere!

I guess my usual “lower” styles don’t allow the shorter pieces to fall out of the ‘do?

Anyways, I was pretty surprised to see how much I have.

The majority come from the area in my front hairline from around where my hairline “bends” around my forehead and down to just under my eyes. The length goes from mouth length to chin length so the pieces are very specific on their origin and terminal length!

I think when gathered up it’s around the thickness of a pencil?  

I found this really, really old picture where I show the donkey ears forming at the area where my hairline “bends” and the short pieces are the most distinct.

I think this picture is at least 5 years old (Really not sure, unfortunately) but its kind of funny to see some things don’t change. 

Today’s hair

There is a thread on UTT about Pinterest and I poked around in what my friends on UTT had pinned of awesome hair inspiration.

Quite a lot of people had pinned an awesome hairstyle where a woman have done three buns placed vertically above each other. It looked really cute!

I decided to try for two braided Nautilusses. (Nautili?!) 

It felt really weird to braid this way! My muscle memory was so not geared for these moves.

But the braids both felt nice and thick all the way down, not like when I do two braids (One in each side) and the left is noticeably thinner than the right because I part in the left side.

The weight distribution feels a bit off though, but I guess it’s natural when you try something so different.

    

Then wrapped the buns up. It felt like the bottom bun got squished a bit…

I had thought I could use my small Flexies (Size large) but they were way too small to close over the inner parts of the Nautilus.

It would look a lot cuter with Flexies or maybe some discrete Ron Quattro forks instead of hairsticks.

  

It’s not the first time I have wished I had an in-between size of Flexi. I have Larges and megaflexies, so I guess it’s time to buy some XL?

It’s a good thing I discovered a new Flexi-provider, because I am not buying directly from the Flexi-people again.

 

This XL dangly is super cute!

Apparently still growing

I was really looking forward to see my length shots. I honestly had no idea just how long my hair is getting and in what state my ends are in.

Once you reach a certain length it becomes impossible to get a real look at your ends yourself. You turn into an eager dog hunting for your tail when you do that.

So I was pretty surprised to see that my ends are still fairly thick, if they haven’t even thickened up!

I really had assumed I would be approaching terminal length by now.

Once you approach terminal length, your ends will thin out a lot.

Before hair sheds to repeat the growth cycle, they enter a resting phase where they don’t grow. This means a true terminal length has extreme taper since not all hairs grow to the same maximum length anyways.

People who are at real, true terminal length usually have just a few hairs that are super long, so if your ends resemble a blunt cut just remotely, you are not near terminal.

Pretty surprising, but I guess I still have a bit of growth left in my scalp. Question is how much longer I will like it. 

Windy video

11 years hairniversary

Hubby thought it was a good idea to take the pictures outside so we had to rush a bit to catch the little bit of daylight we got.  

As you can see, it was pretty windy!

Then we got too cold and went indoors. But by then, the light had gotten pretty bad, so this is the best we could do.

Happy anniversary to me! 

Today’s hair

Bit of improvisation here… The glittery “scrunchies” are way too small to go over the bun, but I hooked them through each other and looped them over the ends of the Flexi 8. They even covered the Flexi 8 perfectly. I likey.