Prim Knickers and the Impossible Ponytail

I woke up late Monday, hair still a tangle of fallen-out curls and sticky hairspray from my Sunday dinner do, and had no choice but to pull the whole mess into a ponytail. Luckily, years of chronic lateness have left me with a well-honed ponytailing method that ideally gets me some, much less runwayish version of this.

Here's how:

1.) Comb a tiny bit of dry shampoo through greasy bangs.

2.) Pull on thin black headband to keep ungreasified bangs off face.

2. a.) This is a huge secret, so you're welcome. Rather than buying slim headbands that are too tight or too slippery, I use a trick I learned from my field hockey team in Catholic high school. Any time a pair of our school-mandated opaque tights got a runner, we would cut them into headbands for hockey practice. You just smooth the tights out flat and cut a 1" to 2" strip straight across the thigh. Tug on it a little to stretch it out, and it will curl up into a nice thin, perfectly stretchy headband. Move your next cut up or down the thigh to make tighter or looser versions.

3.) Don't bother brushing. Tie the rest up onto the crown of your head and pull it tight to pouf up the top.

This process takes about a minute and a half and usually gets me by, as long as I put in contacts and wear tons of mascara.

However, there was no time for contacts. I resorted to my plastic-framed geeky chic glasses, normally saved strictly for amazing hair days in the style of an Oliver Peoples ad campaign.
And what was I late for? Two beauty events. These are meetings teeming with women who know everything about how to look good. I have been given the stink eye before. And the evil eye. I hoped to hide in a dark corner.

And then, the impossible. Multiple compliments on my hair! One beauty editor even told me she could, "never pull that off." Not would never, could never. Huge difference... I think.

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