Bunfight

I wanted to create The Beehive hairdo. How on EARTH girls did this every day in the 60s whilst still being able to get a healthy amount of sleep – I don’t know. No wonder they turned to gin and tonics and smoked like chimneys, says Lucy Telford…

Everywhere I turn these days there seems to be a large volume of large volume hair, ala The Beehive.

In lieu of this quickly becoming the height of popularity, I decided to teach myself, via the Internet, how to emulate it.

The first thing I learned was how to make a mess of my hair. Which for me, having very well behaved, very sleek hair, is a difficult task. I find ‘teasing’ a far more apt name than back combing and I liken the experience to trying to get an unruly child into clothes. It squirms and whinges and complains and every now and again, it splits.

The second thing I learned was how not to make a beehive. This lesson was well learnt and short-lived as my meagre attempt flopped – literally. I tried to pin back a section of hair with height and cement it with enough hairspray to make flies freeze mid air. The hairspray eventually gave in under the weight of the hair and the humidity and I wandered around town (for entirely too long) with half a hive. Awkward.

Youtube was my next answer. I watched several different clips and discovered that one must segment off the crown of one’s head and layer the hair in hairspray and teasing. Sort of like building a building on your head. This made a lot more sense and meant a lot of work.

At approximately 9.30 on Tuesday morning I started with my newly bought supplies and lifted the crown out of the rest of my hair. The first problem I encountered was keeping the crown away from the rest of the hair whilst also being able to access strips. Somehow I managed this, although it did involve a lot of seeing through mops of combed-forward hair.

I wasn’t sure by the videos whether to let the hairspray dry wholly before teasing it, because surely if it was a little bit wet then the hair would be hair sprayed into a knot. But then again – surely that was the point? I decided to make it half-half and I teased it half dry.

Let me just tell you now, this experience was very energy draining for the energy-challenged like myself. Keeping your arms above your head and moving for close to an hour is intense. This also meant that the hair on my arms got fairly crispy as they kept getting in the way of the copious amounts of hairspray.

After some significant teasing and hair spraying, I saw in the mirror what I would look like as the girl from Ringu (the Ring). It’s hard to judge how high you want to go for a first timer and for the amount of effort, there wasn’t much height. I went back and put in a solid ten minutes lifting it a bit further. Then I realised the amount of time I put in to this hairstyle will be equal if not greater when trying to take it out again, so I reverted to bobby pins as I assumed they would have more strength now there was a bit of foundation.

I tried to comb fresh hair over the teased hair, which proved to be interesting, pinned that back too. At this point it must have looked like a little bobby pin graveyard back there, so I re-pinned everything – more than once.

Finally, when I had almost had enough, it came right. I threw on headband and put my hair into a pony tail and voi-la.

This is clearly such an awesome hairstyle because of the amount of effort you put in making it look effortless. How on EARTH girls did this every day in the 60s whilst still being able to get a healthy amount of sleep – I don’t know. No wonder they turned to gin and tonics and smoked like chimneys. In future I will just buy an insert – so much less hassle.

After writing this article, I discovered the most awesome part about this hairdo. If you sleep with your beehive in, you wake up the next morning looking exactly like a Bond girl. Thus the beehive is highly advised for third dates.
By Lucy Telford, 5 May 2010.