Down the Yellow Brick Road Part IV: Prettifying.

Previously:
Part I: The Night Before
Part II: Salon, Supermarket & Judy Garland
Part III: Setting Up

I left the Ruby Slippers parents and bridesmaids in the chapel, scattering petals and setting up candles, and I rushed back to the honeymoon suite where Mel (aka the Ruby Slippers landlady) was waiting to do my makeup. Mel is a costumer and makeup artist by profession, and she offered way back when to do my wedding day makeup, as well as that of my bridesmaids, as her wedding gift to us. Since I'd seen how much makeup artists charge, especially to go out to a venue, I was thrilled to agree.

You might recall that this was my makeup inspiration:

(Source: Project Wedding)

Here I am with all my red bits and black circles covered up with, um, whatever it is they use:

And Mel doing some final touches:
What it looked like at the end. I LOVED it:
Then Mel got going on Sister Ruby Slippers. Here she is having her eyelashes squeezed. I hate that part!
All of the above photos were taken by BFF Ruby Slippers, and there are therefore unfortunately no photos of her getting her makeup done. I was in far too much of a frazzly tizz by this point even to think of taking any. But I did get a shot of the back of her hair!

While the girls were getting their makeup done, my hairstylist Megan arrived with her assistant. I love the "Gleep!" look on my face here!


The next two are my hair inspirations. However, we had to go with curlier, more ringletty curls for the length of my hair, because, as proved by my trial, my hair doesn't hold more free-flowing curls. It's excessively curly or nothing.


I swear she used a whole bottle of hairspray on my hair. Those curls were SOLID.


Here's Megan putting my tiara on. I'm not sure what I'm doing with my hand!


And fixing the last few curls around my tiara. I love, love, love, how it looks in my hair, and overall I really loved the whole look of my hair, too.


I think this is where Tanja arrived, because this is the first shot she got, of Mel fixing up my lipstick after I'd finished the hairstyling.

Whooooa, cleavage again!

And, finally, one of me just sitting, looking pensive. I have no idea when Tanja took this, or why I was even sitting down (did I have TIME for that? I don't remember that!), but I love the expression on my face. Not happy, not excited, just calm and serene. Just waiting to become a wife...the wife of the man I love above everything.

I joined the PWCC

The Post-Wedding Chop Club, that is. After having long, straight, boring hair my whole life, I just couldn't take it anymore. All the other post-wedding chop stories I kept reading about didn't help, either! I just had to get rid of it.

The last time I cut my hair was in 1990. I was eleven, and I had a fringe (that's bangs to my American readers) cut in and my hair cut just above shoulder-length. I grew it out, and the fringe followed suit in 1996 for my matric dance. I've had trims and shorter layers around my face since then, but it's been pretty basic long and (yawn) straight. The wedding was the perfect catalyst to try something new and fab.

I figured I might as well include our tree in the before shots :-) We just put it up on the weekend.
This is probably the best shot of how long my hair was!

Look at our Corpse Bride cake toppers on the tv. Awwww.

And just for the heck of it, here I am showing Gollum the tree:

He liked the little baubles:


Ahem. Sorry, he's so adorable, I get carried away. So back to my hair.

These are the pics I took with to show my hairdresser:
This is the pic (Sarah Chalke from Scrubs) I had in mind many months ago, when I first wailed that I needed a hairchop.


I don't know who this is, I just like the way it doesn't have a fringe. Even though the fringes LOOK good, I know they annoy the heck out of me.
Mrs Cherrypie from Weddingbee! She said she didn't like the cut, but I think it looked great. And it was especially nice to see a real person with real hair, not hair that's been styled and sleekened to the hilt.

Halle Berry. I love this one, but I wanted mine a little longer.

So without further ado, I present to you the chopped Mrs Ruby Slippers (with no makeup or anything; I know, I look like crap, but I was too lazy to put on my face just for a photo):

So I made a stupid face instead.

And from the side:

Aside from my stupid ear sticking through there like a stuck-on elf ear, I think it looks great! I'm so happy with it! And it's so light!

It's weird brushing it, though.

Mr RS thinks the next step is going red. We'll see...

In seven days, you will see the ring...

Wedding ring, that is ;-) Hopefully not the other, freaky-girl-child-climbs-out-the-tv kind.

All day long I was looking at the clock, thinking "Now we'd be arriving at the salon for our hair"..."Now I should be getting into my dress"..."Now I'll be walking down the aisle"... even my mom sent me an email at 3:45 this afternoon, saying that she realised that one week from today I would be transforming into MRS Ruby Slippers! Eeee!

I didn't do anything tonight. I watched a bunch of Grey's Anatomy and tried to breathe, and worried about how pudgy my tummy is. Seriously, that whole "bride losing weight before the wedding" thing is complete crap. Ever heard of stress-eating?? Well, I have, and so has my tummy. Hello, chocolate, my old friend.

My skin has been fabulous for weeks now. Which means that it has seven days to go nuts still. I guess eating all those potato chips for lunch won't help that cause. Buggrit.

I had a semi-hair trial, where I went to the salon ostensibly to talk about what I wanted, and ended up having my stylist and another guy testing out ways to curl my hair using different heaters, rollers, tongs, flat-irons, the works. Guess which one worked the best? Yeah...NONE of them. After five minutes every curl was hanging limply like week-old lettuce around my head. And I had so much hairspray in it made my nose itch. I wouldn't care about the hairspray if it held the curls, but apparently I have the stupidest hair in the world. My stylist says I lack inter-cellular cement, or something. Shrug. We didn't cover that in biology.


The two hairstyles I told her to base mine on.

I suggested to my stylist that I bring my own rollers in on the day, and that she puts my tiara in, the top part of my hair up, and then sends me on my way with the back rollers still in, which I will take out at the last possible moment. She then told me that since I first booked her, her days in the salon have been altered to accommodate a recent neck injury which was being aggravated by her working so often, and that now she's not working on the day of my wedding. She suggested that I still come in to the salon and get the bulk of my hair done, and that she then drives out to the venue and fixes the ends for me at the last minute. I thought this was incredibly kind of her, because it's over 25 kilometres to my venue, down a busy road that takes some time to get through. She already knew that the reason I wasn't having her come to the venue was because I couldn't afford that, so she can't have expected me now to offer to pay her for that, and I did try to talk her out of it but she said she would be happy to do it. I just hope she actually is. I guess I should get her something as a thank-you gift... maybe a box of chocolates and a little money to cover at least her petrol costs? Because it's really not in the budget to pay her properly to come out when I'm already paying her to do my hair at her salon! What do you think?

Hair trials

Or, in my case, the trial of finding a hairstylist. Yep, that's right - I'm two and a half months away and I STILL don't have a stylist. I feel like I've been a bit lazy about this, but honestly everyone keeps quoting me exorbitant travel costs that make me run for the hills and never want to come out of my safe little cave. I really want to get my hair done at the venue, because in the morning I have to oversee the setting-up of the reception hall and chapel, to make sure that everyone keeps in line with my vision (because it's myyyyy daaaaay!!!). If I then have to get in my car and drive off somewhere to do my hair, and then drive back again, it's (a) going to waste pretty much an hour of my day just on travel, and (b) tire me out even more, which is really not a good plan!

Which is why the stylists can quote you R1000 to come out to the venue and get away with it.

A few months ago I met up with a hairdresser who is a friend of a friend. He arrived half an hour late, didn't answer his phone either of the times I called him during that time, and then proceeded to tell me he didn't hear his phone ring because he was driving. Later in the conversation he mentioned that he lives five minutes away from the place where we were meeting - which means that if it took him 5 minutes to get there, he was still at home BOTH times I phoned him. Needless to say, I didn't want to hire an unreliable liar for the most important day of my life, so I brushed him off.

The next two people were too expensive, and my regular hairdresser doesn't travel out because she works from home and has a baby.

So in the last month I've just pretty much given up...which is BAD, very bad! On the upside, at least I know what sort of style I want! Something mostly down, lightly curled, and covering my ears, which are my least favourite part of my anatomy (followed swiftly by my knees). Something like these:

I also really love the look of this one, but I'd want the back part loose. The twisted hair on the crown of her head is phenomenal, though:

My obsession with photography blogs leads me to find a new idea practically every day! However, at least there's a clear pattern emerging with the hairstyles I like, so that's something! Now if I can just find someone to create it...

I need a change! Post haste...but post-wedding...

Ok, so over the last few months I’ve grown totally sick of my hair. I never DO anything with it! It’s so flat and booooring. So now I really feel like mixing things up, cutting it all off or going red, or something. The only problem is…THE WEDDING! I can’t change anything until after the wedding! Because I want long, loose curls, so it has to be long, and I want to be blonde, because I’ve been blonde for 29 years and my wedding photos is not the place to change that! So suddenly I can’t wait until November when I can do something like totally radical, hey.
You know how boring Gwyneth Paltrow is? My hair looks like hers. Only thinner and less well-groomed.

I think I could carry off a choppy bob like Elliott did in Scrubs a few seasons back, when she did a big makeover:

Fun, Huh? Anybody else planning on making a big change after their wedding?