Cosplay styles - Lúthien braided hairstyle

When I'm cosplaying Lúthien Tinúviel from Tolkien's Silmarillion, I usually wear my hair loose with heatless curls on the ends and a simple braided half-up with leaf ribbons, gems and/or small white flowers (I'll be posting some pics of that style in the near future).

During a Tolkien convention in December 2014, however, I ended up experimenting and came up with a multibraided hairstyle. I usually imagine Lúthien with loose hair, but I think braids would fit her too, especially when your present occupation is being on a quest that involves walking long distances and fighting evil Dark Lords! (she did have her hair shorter during the quest, if we're being purist, but do bear with me).

So this is how it looked:

It's a fairly simple multibraided style, the half-up is the same I usually do when cosplaying Lúthien with loose hair, it involves two three-strand side-braids (lace-braids or simple English braids) with leaf ribbons braided into them and either small gems or small synthetic flowers as decoration (or both!).  The next step of this style involves braiding all the hair into another three-strand braid with a paranda, and adding flowers to the braid as a final touch.

And several pics from a nature shoot from September 2015:

And with just the two sides braids, with the rest loose:

 

(Here the lower length density is slightly photoshopped in this pic because the ends came out really clumply and stringy because of the braid, and I tried to make it look a bit more like my hair's non-stringy state xD. Length is real xD):

I'll probably be doing a couple of video tutorials for my Lúthien styles soon-ish :)!

SwordWomanRiona / rionashairblog.blogspot.com.es

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Hairstyles - One-coil Chinese braided bun (video tutorial)

My latest hairstyle video tutorial is about what I call the 'one-coil Chinese bun', in its braided variation. It's different from the standard 'Chinese bun' when it comes to wrapping the hair around the stick - Instead of separating the length in two before wrapping, my 'one-coil' variation involves wrapping all the hair around the stick, then over the elastic to hide it (in the standard Chinese bun the fact that the hair is separated before wrapping it around the stick covers the elastic), and around the stick again until you run out of hair:

 

                                         

I personally find my 'one-coil' variation, braided or unbraided, to be more secure than the standart Chinese bun, for which my hair needs a lot of pins to prevent it from slipping and becoming undone.

 

✨Picture gallery:

✨Without the paranda:

With two sticks, a more elongated version:

With an accent braid:

 

✨Rope-braided variation:

 

✨And with ribbons:

SwordWomanRiona / rionashairblog.blogspot.com.es

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More bendy roller curls and length shortening updo

This is the style I did for the singing end-of-term concert at my music academy. A length-shortening updo with bendy rollers heatless curls on the ends:

• Texture: Braidwaves + bendy rollers curls on the ends.

 -More posts about my bendy rollers experiments here

After braiding my post-shower mostly-dry hair in a three strand braid with a paranda, I wrapped the ends around a bendy roller, secured it with an elastic and sprayed the ends and some of the length with salty water generously (I use Lush's Salt Sea Spray). I wore my hair like that for nearly a day and took the bendy roller and the paranda off just before the concert. These below are the results at the end of the concert (roughly two hours after I took the bendy roller off).


The Salt Sea spray gives me quite a lot of hold, especially when I leave the roller on at least overnight. The curls do fall a bit after a few hours, but I retained waves in my hair until the next time I washed it. Cons for me are that, even though this salty spray is infinitely heathier and more effective than hairspray for my hair, it can get a bit frizzy and tangly, and I generally oil my ends generously with jojba or sweet-almond oil to avoid dryness after these sporadic times when I need a lot of fixation (I have yet to try flax seed gel as a (moisturizing!) fixator, Henrietta recommended it to me, and I really want to try it out).

• Style: Length-shortening cinnamon bun. 

 -Posts about my length shortening updos here

This style is very similar to the cinnamon half-updo here, only with curls at the ends. I used a couple of spin pins and a Gimli axe hairstick (I sang Hobbit songs :) ) to keep the cinnamon bun part in place. And in this case, I added an accent braid at each side, gathered into the high ponytail with the rest of the hair before bunning it.

SwordWomanRiona / rionashairblog.blogspot.com.es

-The site www.fashionlita.com is stealing quite a lot of material from this blog, even though I've tried to block their IP twice so that they wouldn't be able to steal any more posts of mine. I wanted to mention that those posts were copied and pasted from my blog without my permission. 

More bendy rollers curls and ponytail length shot :)

More bendy rollers curls! Plus bonus ponytail length shots :)

-Read about my bendy rollers experiments here and here

I used just a bendy roller on my ends, and left the rest of my post-shower hair braided with a paranda. I sprayed quite a lot of salt water on the ends just after I wrapped them around the roller (Lush's Sea Spray Light Mist, especifically. I don't like a lot of things about Lush. For one, they claim to be oh-so-natural, but still use non-natural ingredientes such as parabens and cocamide DEA, which is actually carcinogenic - it's misleading and pretty ironic of a 'natural' hair-and-body shop to add such an ingredient to some of their products. Plus their sexist policies when it comes to doing anti-animal testing activism. Still, I have to grudginly admit that I do like this product).  And wow, next day when I undid the roller, the curls lasted for the whole day and the Sea Spray mist had given them quite a lot of hold. My hair is veruy fine-textured and stubbornly straight, and most of my heatless curls and waves tend to fall back to straightness veeery quickly, but this time they lasted the whole day. At the end of the day, the curls had fallen a bit, but they were still pretty much there:

Plus this spray mist gave me a hold that is way less damaging than hairspray, in my opinion, it hardly dried my ends at all. I oiled them slightly with jojoba oil just in case, though. I don't like to put products on my ends, but this turned out well, so I already know what to do if I need to have curls on my ends that last more than an hour xD

SwordWomanRiona / rionashairblog.blogspot.com.es

-The site www.fashionlita.com is stealing quite a lot of material from this blog, even though I've tried to block their IP twice so that they wouldn't be able to steal any more posts of mine. I wanted to mention that those posts were copied and pasted from my blog without my permission. 

Length shot May 2015: Knee length!

• Warning to the site Fashion Lita: I have but shortly noticed that you've been stealing many of my posts, copying and pasting a considerable number of them shortly after they were being published, without any credit, name or link, and without my permission. Please just STOP doing this. This is copyright infringement. 

(Sorry to spam you about this, but that wesite has been stealing many of my posts. I think I've succeeded in blocking their IP from accessing this blog, let us hope it works)

I reached my goal of knee-length at long last! :D Now to maintain in order to get rid of some splits and thicken up the hemline - My ends have been a bit thin since last Autumn, so now I've reached my goal, it's all going to be about maintaining trims :)

Length shot with houseclothes and post-shower hair that's still a bit damp, but hey, milestone!!

SwordWomanRiona / rionashairblog.blogspot.com.es

-The site www.fashionlita.com is stealing quite a lot of material from this blog, even though I've tried to block their IP twice so that they wouldn't be able to steal any more posts of mine. I wanted to mention that those posts were copied and pasted from my blog without my permission. 

Austria trip 2013: Some hair pics

I rather like these hair pics taken while visiting Austria a couple of years ago, so it's a random hair pic kind of post today :)!

Parandas - High braided ponytail

Lately I've been using parandas all the time, in braids, length-shortening updos and braided updos :) 

A paranda is a hair accessory, traditionally braided into the hair in India to make it look longer and/or thicker, or simply as an adornment.  It consists of three strands of coloured threads, usually with tassels at the end. 

Apart from the adornment that is having coloured wool in your braid, I love parandas because they help keeping my slippery fine-textured, straight hair in place for longer when wearing braids, and they also make my braid thicker, which I personally like. 

I have a couple of parandas, made of purple wool, without tassels. I learned how to make it thanks to this tutorial: 

I uploaded a hairstyle tutorial last week, so here's the video and a couple of pics. It's a pretty straightforward style, a braided high ponytail, and one of my favourite go-to styles, both for day-to-day activites, sword-fighting, and ranger cosplay :)

• Pic gallery:

                                 SwordWomanRiona / rionashairblog.blogspot.com.es

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A couple of length shots

Just sharing a couple of length shots from yesterday, with bonus cherry tree :)