In case you missed my first (and I thought only!) entry in the hair drama journal, click here for some background. Long story short: Mr. B made it clear to me that he does not want my hair fully up, even though I love having an updo. I then bought a dress that led me to believe my hair needs to be up. I thought I could get away with it.
Flash forward to a few days ago: I was messing around with my hair, putting it up in crazy styles, and asking Mr. B what he would do if I walked down the aisle like that. At one point he very seriously said he knew I would not “do that to him” and that he knew I would have my hair “showing in some way.” Cue panic. What?! Why did I think he would be OK with my hair being up?!
Well, now I am back to the drawing board and I need some help. My original compromise style inspiration was this:
 |
Image via Style Me Pretty / Photography by Chris Bailey Photography / Event design by Keely Thorne Events
I do not plan on showing my dress but I will tell you this—it has a very pretty keyhole back, similar to this:
So I think we need to address the fact that I have dreadlocks.
I’m not a hippy, or a vegan, nor do I listen to Jamaican music. This is everyone’s assumption. They also assume that it’s OK to touch my hair when I walk past them in the street (?!) and that I am guaranteed to stop when street fundraisers target me. Hello—I’m on my lunch break just like everyone else!
Would you like to know the real reason I have dreads?
…I have really, really, fine hair.
And that’s the honest truth!
When I was 12 I started dying my hair for the first time—it was really blonde when I was little, but then I started to get darker when I got older and the bleach came out. I dyed it blonde continuously for eight years, and then I did something even more drastic. I dyed it black.
 |
All photos personal
I liked it! I could get away with it being “messy” when it was black, but when the roots started showing through I looked like I had an airport runway on the top of my head—not a good look.
So I dyed it back. But dying it back meant that I pretty much ruined my hair. My already fine hair. It became so fine that it basically just stuck to my face and the only thing I could do to make it look good was to chop it all off.
I had my hair trial last Friday! It was a busy day because, as one of the two Senior Advisory Board sponsors, I had just finished organizing and chaperoning the Class of 2013 senior picnic. I’ve been referring to the senior events as my “second wedding,” as it has involved designing and printing senior T-shirts, collecting money, securing payments for vendors, organizing catering and decorations for a senior breakfast, organizing catering and a DJ for the senior picnic. It has been a LOT of work and a lot of extra stress these last few weeks. But the good news is that everything came together perfectly. There were a few mistakes here and there, but I will know better for next year. I’m just glad it’s over and that means one huge worry and time commitment off my shoulders. Now to focus more on the wedding (and the big tests my AP world history and economics kids will be taking).
I rushed straight from the picnic (in my own senior T-shirt) to the salon. I wasn’t feeling very bridal or beautiful, but I left feeling really happy and confident in the skills of my stylist. I came in feeling like a hot mess and I this is what I left with:
One of the few many subjects Mr. B had an opinion about is how I will wear my hair. He will not know anything about my bridal look and he trusts me completely, but I know what he likes and doesn’t like. He told me he didn’t want me to wear my hair all the way up, even though he knows I love getting updos. He wants to marry the woman he proposed to in the Tallahassee airport, not some woman from a bridal magazine. I get that, I really do. I decided that I would do a half up/half down situation as a compromise. Here was my original inspiration for how I would wear my hair:
 |
Image via Style Me Pretty / Photography by Chris Bailey Photography / Event design by Keely Thorne Events
I think this is beautiful and polished but also still “me.” OK, one decision down! Wait, not so fast…I went dress shopping and everything changed. As I tried on every dress, I would put my hair up with my hands to see how it looked. My consultant kept offering me her hair band, but I kept insisting that I couldn’t wear my hair up. As soon as I stepped out of the dressing room in what would become THE dress I grabbed her hair band and knew my hair would be up. It just had to be! Everyone agreed that Mr. B would get over it and that I would look beautiful (great friends, right?!). Fortunately, he has since pointed out a few updo options as “It would be OK if your hair looks like that.”
Hive, you are the best! Thank you for each and every one of the sweet comments on my post about what went wrong on the wedding day. I know that other people have much, much more to complain about than I do, so I really appreciate just laying it out there and getting a sweet response from all of you! I’ve started a list of recaps that I plan to write (eeek!), but I wanted to talk about a couple more things before we get photos and really start recapping.
If you’ve been around the ’bee for a while, you’ve probably seen these acronyms before. The Post Wedding Chop is something many great bees before me have participated in. Typically, these lovely ladies grow their hair out for the wedding, and then chop it off after. Some chops have been just a few inches (like Mrs. Mink’s), some chops have been new bangs (like Mrs. Wallaby’s), and some chops have been accidental manglings of gorgeous hair (I’m sorry, Mrs. Cola!). But whatever chop it was, it was post wedding.
I’ve been growing my hair out for a long, long time. I chopped it one time, and it just never grew back. But finally, it started growing. Hooray! For the wedding, I knew I wanted to leave it down and curled, and with thin hair, we thought we may have to use extensions. Thankfully, my hair proved to be enough, and my hair came out like this for the big day:
Photo by Stacy Able Photography / Our first kiss as Mr. + Mrs.!
Surprisingly, I did have a few friends ask about my post wedding hair plans. Would I go auburn like I always say I want to? Finally allow someone to trim it? Perhaps I would even get really crazy and get some bangs??? Here is my post wedding hair:
I had my hair and makeup trial recently and I have to tell you all, I cannot believe I’ve hit THAT time. Time for a trial and vendor meetings and everything else. The Palm Trees are a little more than one month away and it’s INSANE. After a year and a half of planning, it’s so exciting to be so close.
I digress—this post is about my hair and makeup trial and at the risk of spoiling everything, it was so incredibly successful. First and foremost, I love Nicci, of Bella Brides by Nicci is phenomenal. She is so talented and just knows what she’s doing and how to do it. I’m sure this is par for the course for beauticians, but truthfully, this is the first time that I’m getting my hair and makeup done professionally for an event. In the past, I’ve relied on my friends (who are also talented, don’t get me wrong) and I was just thoroughly in awe of her abilities.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, I love big hair. I’ve always known that I’d want my hair half-up, half-down, big and curly. Of course, as I learned when we searched for both my dress and the bridesmaids’ dresses, sometimes what you think will work just doesn’t. I am so excited to say that this DID work and I’m in love with the result.
I brought Nicci four inspiration pictures, including the following:
photo via Getty Images, found on WomensDay.com
The other three were all Carrie as well, of course. As far as makeup, I had zero inspiration. I told her that I wanted something that really made my eyes pop. She delivered on both counts, in my opinion.
all photos personal
All my life when people have said I was a blonde I’ve quickly come back with, “My hair is not blonde! I am definitely a brunette.” And that’s true…sort of. I have kind of “in between” hair. It’s not really blonde, but it’s also not brown—I guess a lot of people would call it a dirty blonde. In the summer my hair lightens to a golden blonde with almost pure white streaks, while in the winter it grows out to a light brown.
I just posted this picture the other day, but in our engagement pictures you can see the progression from darker brown to golden blonde to ash blonde. Clearly my hair had grown out several inches since the summer blonde!
Image via Niki Marie Photography
I didn’t realize how dark my hair had gotten until I saw this picture from the marathon my sister ran several weeks ago. Ignore the part where I look like I’ve been up since 4:30 AM…I’d been up since 4:30 AM driving around a marathon course cheering “Way to go! Keep it up!” at every runner that passed by. Marathon spectating is hard work, you guys. (My sister rocked it!)
I recently shared my inspiration and deep love for big-ass country singer hair, and now I’m going to share the results. I took pictures every step of the way—including immediately post-shower—so be gentle with me, here.
First things first: my hair, immediately post-shower.
Clearly, the way to make the MySpace-tastic bathroom cell phone sans makeup picture OK is to make silly faces.
This was immediately after my shower—all I did here was comb it. As you can see, not much life to it. It exists, it’s there, it’s alive, and…that’s about it. If I were to let it dry without doing anything else, it’d look pretty much like it does right here except moisture-less.
I set to work blow-drying my hair, using the “low” setting.
With the makeup perfected, it was time to move on to the hair. My awesome stylist, Priska from Priska Coiffure in Montreal is also the same person who worked her magic on my hair for the engagement shoot back in July. So with the picture of Tyra in hand, she set to working on a similar style. I didn’t want it to be an exact replica of her style, but something that worked with my hair length and type.
We ended up working out three versions of the side wave. The versions may not seem all that different, but trust me, they were. This is a very pic-heavy post, so apologies in advance!
*All photos are personal unless otherwise noted.
Here was version #1—the wave was swept totally to the side of my head.
See what I did with that title? 
I’ve already expressed my general distaste for and inability to do all things DIY. One is not likely to find a bigger fail whale than the aftermath of my glue gun and me spending some QT together.
So why did I decide to do my own hair and makeup for our engagement pictures? Because I’m stubborn. And cheap.
I originally reached out to the artist (is that the technical term?) doing hair and makeup for my girls and me on our wedding day, and it simply cost too much to justify. Her work is gorgeous, without a doubt, and I’m super excited to have her…but I just couldn’t do it for our engagement pictures.
I had a vision of my hair in our engagement pictures. It was something kind of like this:
Sources, from top left: Faith Hill via moviespad.com, Carrie Underwood via Nash Vegas News, Julianne Hough via perfectlocks.com, Faith Hill via rootfun.net, Faith Hill via newhairstyles-haircuts.info, and Carrie Underwood via woohair.com / Sensing a pattern?
Yup, friends, you caught me: I love big-ass country singer hair. In fact, those were the words I said to BMs Y and Blackout recently. “I want to look like a country singer.” Unfortunately for me, my hair doesn’t really hear the words that come out of my mouth.
Aahhhhh, to have your hair and makeup professionally done every day…what girl wouldn’t want this kind of pampering?? Sadly I’m neither a rock star nor a gazillionaire, so I’ll just have to settle for getting beautified on this one special day in May. 
While up in Montreal this past weekend, it made sense to schedule my hair and makeup trial at this time to determine the looks for the big day. As I mentioned in a previous post, my “hair-spiration” was a fabulous Tyra Banks updo, and for makeup, some kind of semi-smokey-eye look. Ladies, do yourself a favor and make sure to schedule a trial before your big day—the last thing you want is to be (unpleasantly) surprised the morning of the wedding because you hadn’t previously given your looks a test run.
My trial started with makeup first—and I even remembered to take a few “before” pics specifically for the blog.
*All photos are personal unless otherwise noted
Is it charm, is it poise? No, it’s Hairspray.
A more apt title for this post could have been “Hairspiration,” but this song just kept popping in my head so I decided to try and be clever.
I am always on the lookout for hair and makeup inspiration pictures (to pin to my “Wedding—EEE!” board on Pinterest, ahem). At this point, I haven’t nailed down exactly what I want my makeup to be like, but I know—and honestly, have always known—what I want my hair to be like.
Mr. Palm Tree and I both share a WTF sentiment at this new craze that has had girls wearing their hair down and straight, like in everyday life, for special events. I have absolutely no clue where this came from, but it makes no sense to me. We both much prefer Princess Giselle’s look in everyday life than the ridiculousness that was her “elegant” look for the ball. (I must have my hubby James Marsden on the brain; after looking at those pictures I YouTube’d “True Love’s Kiss.” Not ashamed, folks, not ashamed.)
True confessions (I do this a lot, huh?): I will never be the person who gets out of bed early enough to perfect hair and makeup and arrive at work impeccable. Quite the contrary, I am the person who barely wakes up with enough time to do enough with her hair and put on enough makeup to arrive at work acceptable. This, of course, is something I feel should carry over to my wedding-day look – although I will undeniably spend much more time and effort on how I look, I still want to look like myself.
 |
Image via Kristin Newman Designs / Found on A Low Country Wedding / As gorgeous as this is, it would never work for me.
I’ve always known that a half-up, half-down style would suit me perfectly. It will keep the hair out of my face, and I’ll still be able to get curls (something I can almost NEVER sport, ever) and huge volume. My favorite hair has always been giant, country star hair (…foreshadowing… ahem), but pictures like this still look my breath away:
With my hair & makeup trial coming up in a month, I’ve been scouring the interwebs to find the perfect looks and started off with hairstyles. I pinned ones that would look great with a feather fascinator and veil, like the images below.
Image via The Knot.com
So I was (I thought) 100% convinced of how I wanted to wear my hair for the wedding. You see, I’m all about looking like myself on my wedding day. I wanted to buy a dress that was “me,” that was comfortable, and that I could see myself wearing on any other day (if it wasn’t white and a wedding dress…). So when it came to hair, I wanted to follow the same principles. And I basically have one “favorite” way of wearing my hair, the same way I wore it in our engagement shoot.
Photo by Niki Marie Photography
Yeah, I’m kinda boring, but basically curly and pinned half back. I have a lot of heavy hair, so having it hang in my face drives me crazy! My hair now is even longer than in this picture.
So easy enough, right? I looked up pictures and found tons of inspiration for long curly hair—ways to make me look dressy yet still myself.
Y’all, like I mentioned in my last post, there’s a hodge podge of things coming at you—so much has happened in the past few weeks, time is flying by, and things are getting checked off the list so quickly that I can’t keep up! (Which is definitely a good thing. )
I was going for Miley makeup—something pretty neutral and a little smokey on the eyes, but with big, big lashes. You see, I’m a bad example of how to wear makeup because while I wash my face daily, I don’t take my mascara off until the last possible day that it looks acceptable. I like my eyelashes to be super big, and since I have zero skills in applying makeup, false lashes aren’t in my future.
Photo via Fanpop / Miley’s Oscar 2010 look (I’m crazy obsessed with that Jenny Packham dress!)
So with all that said, here’s the before and after! (I’d like to point out that my eyes were NOT supposed to be closed, but Momma Otter took the photo and didn’t think to alert me to the fact that I closed my eyes. Sigh.)
