Last month, Marina inboxed me on FB asking for help with finding a half up, half down style for her younger sister who has hip length hair. She said that she Googled styles, but hadn’t had much luck. I told her that I quickly learned that I had to go “outside of the box” to find hairstyles for longer hair and couldn’t limit myself to YouTubers with natural and/or curly hair. Then, I pointed her to a couple of my favorite YouTubers for updo hairstyles, LilithMoon and Let’s Make It Up and shared links for a few style tutorials that I thought might work.

Now, Marina is back, sharing the style that she and her sister chose and their results! 

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by Marina

This was my sister Isabella’s high school graduation hairstyle. She graduated on June 27th at age 16! She’ll be leaving Suriname in September to study Classical Ballet at a renowned dance academy in New York City.

I used this video as hairspiration, very kindly suggested to me by Shelli!

A couple of days before we did the style, I trimmed about 3-4 inches off of Isabella’s hair, which was tailbone length! She has a natural curl varying from 2a-3c and has very fine strands. Some of her curl was loosened significantly following two brazilian keratin treatments.

I prepared her freshly washed hair with a tiny amount of Shea Moisture Conditioner as a leave-in and left it to dry in four big twists. When her hair was dry, I added a liberal amount of Sabino Moisture Block, half pinned it up and started barrel curling the bottom with a curling iron. We had to rush a bit, because although we planned to do her hair and make-up from 3:45-5:15, I got home late and we only started at 4.15!

Prep

Front view

Side view

Giving her Valedictory speech!

Isabella and me

Mum, Isabella and me

At the end of the night.

(Seems the hair didn’t quite survive the four hour ceremony in 97% humidity with a dew point of around 75! The clips were slightly wobbly due to her cap.)

Hope you like it and thanks very much for your help in sending all those ideas and tips!

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Were you natural or transitioning when you graduated? How did you wear your natural hair to accommodate your cap and keep it fly ;)?