Destinee Cushing

I’m officially one month in to my cosmetology program! That’s crazy. This week was full of pin curls and rollers, so again, another great week. I’ll get into exactly what we worked with, but I had a separately exciting thing happen this week. I got my bachelor’s degree in the mail! I’m an official alumna of the University of Central Florida. 🙂 It sounds funny, but I’m so happy to be furthering my education with cosmetology. I’m going to do some really cool stuff with this industry.

Anyway, my hit style of the week was a triple braided bun with a braided pompadour.

Here are the interesting things I got to do in class this week:

We did flat and stand-up pin curls this week in class. Unfortunately, we moved so quickly I didn’t get to style either of the pin curl sets.

We also learned how to use Velcro and magnetic curlers on our manikins. The first picture is of our very uniform state board test curler set. I made the middle picture’s hairstyle from that set. The last picture is of the freestyle set that we did afterward. I’m setting all of the hair to swoop to the right side.

Speaking of state board sets, I finished mine with the pin curls, rollers, and finger waves. The finger waves are getting easier to do, I just need to get a bit faster with them.

I also washed, blow dried, and styled a manikin with short hair for the first time during the personal service time on Friday. It was interesting figuring out how to blow dry the hair  so it wouldn’t stick up unnaturally, but I did it!

The reason for washing and drying the shorter hair was to learn Marcel curls with the old-fashioned Marcel curling irons. They are heated up in a ceramic stove, then after being tested for the right temperature they are used to curl the hair in a variety of ways. I was able to practice some curls with the smaller iron on my manikin. But the real treat will be when I get to practice Marcel waves from the 1920s to 1940s on longer hair next week.

 

I learned SO much this week, and we had a snow day! These posts are definitely getting longer, but I really want to document as much of my progress as possible through school. 🙂 I know I sound like a broken record, but I’m so excited to see where this journey will take me.

My second week involved two things: finger waves and blowouts. It was AWESOME. I’ve been trying to learn finger waves for over two years now and just couldn’t get them until this week! Mrs. Kim is apparently the best in the building at finger waves, according to Lou (the art director), and man can she teach them! I understood them in one day and was confidently doing them on people by the end of the week. 😀

I also got much better at really sealing the cuticle layer of the hair (which protects the hair and gives it shine) in my blowouts. I’m also getting faster at them! That’s beneficial, since we had a blow dry practical (performance exam) this week.

So here was my hairstyle for the week! In the spirit of what we were learning I tried some of the blowout techniques on myself and used our ionic blow drier. It gave my hair SO much volume with no product other than some aerosol hairspray at the end.

Here’s what I got to play with this week:

I washed and blow dried my classmate Agnis’s hair this week. It was my first time washing and drying longer hair on an actual person!

I also got more practice blow drying my manikin’s hair and I really got it to shine this time! It was very light, but thanks to a bit of product and really drying the hair along the cuticle, closing it, I was able to get a nice finish on the hairstyle.

 

So the picture on the left is my first attempt at finger waves in cosmetology school. It blows anything I’ve done up until this point out of the water, but it still has a long ways to go. On the right, you can see the finger waves I did the next day. The ridges are closer together and the hair is less separated. I’m already improving! Woop woop.

So every Friday we have extra time to perform “personal service” on classmates or practice whatever we’d like. This week I did finger waves in Eric’s hair! It was his awesome idea. I did two waves then dried them for about 20 minutes. Once they were totally dry I brushed them out, maintaining the ridges, and I thought they looked quite suave! They stayed through Saturday too, apparently. 🙂

Finally learning how to do finger waves this week was HUGE for me. It was one of my biggest goals of cosmetology school and I’ve already learned them in the third week! I have room to improve, but I couldn’t be happier with what I’m learning at the Rizzieri Aveda school.

My second week at Aveda has been so fun that it all went by in a blur! We really jumped in this week with hot tools, such as the curling wand (a curling iron with no clamp), blow drier, and the Nalu waver (which is basically a curling iron with two barrels and no clamps). We also learned shampooing and blow drying actual people, rather than our manikins. It was quite a bit different. 🙂

I’m also going to start posting my hit hairstyle of the week! I’ve been playing around with different, fun hairstyles to wear to school. I’m just going to share one each week on my blog when one is accepted especially well. This week I did a double French braid and bun!

Okay, getting down to business now. I’ve been taking pictures of nearly everything I do to keep track of my progress in school! Here’s what I did this week:

We learned how to do an actual blowout with volume this week, using the round brush mainly. I love how the hair flows, shines, and doesn’t lay flat.

   

This was especially fun for me. We used the curling wand (aka canonical iron) and pinned the curls to the head so they would set for a longer-lasting and tighter curl. When we took the curls out Mrs. Kim said we could style the hair however we’d like, so naturally I did a new vintage hairstyle with victory rolls! 😀

We learned how to use the double-barreled Nalu waver, which has equal-sized barrels. We alternated curling techniques to make a textured, natural-looking curl.

I washed, blow dried, and styled my friend Eric’s hair for the first time this week! I was excited about that because he has a vintage haircut.

So I’m only going to apologize once for the length of my post … sooorryy! This is probably going to be the typical length of my weekly posts from now on. We’re learning so many things so quickly in class that I hardly even have time to snap pics of what I’ve done! But I’m totally fine with the pace. I’m going to walk away from this experience having learned and grown so much. 🙂