hello!! im going to tackle maribelle's hair soon, do you have any tips for the curliness that is her hair? o:
Darling, what an excellent choice in character!
Check it out, it’s Maribelle. Also, Jenn is typing this post but is basically writing down some version of what Christine is ranting about from the kitchen as she makes dinner.
I’ve seen existing cosplayers go about it in three ways: drill curls, sausage curls and “fuck it, this wig is curly, that works, right?”
First off, to get this out of the way, drill curls:
There are a lot of tutorials out there for “drill curls”, those god-awful anime curls where the hair is turning in giant anti-gravity spirals. One of the best ones is Arda’s tutorial, I think. If you’re interested in doing drill curls, that’s probably your best bet, but that’s also JUST the drill curl option.
But here’s the thing: drill curls look great on really stylized costumes, but they are also very, very particular. Theoretically, anyway. Very, very, very seldom do they end up looking good IRL, imho; I find they tend to look hard and crunchy, and it takes a lot of precision to do them without them looking like a sloppy mess. Is it more “accurate”? Arguably, for characters like Mami from Madoka or Nui from Kill La Kill. Is it accurate to Maribelle? I dunno. I’ve seen a number of cosplayers do drill curls for Maribelle so maybe to some people it is, but I just think it looks weird.
Maribelle is a lady. A bonafide pressed-white-collars and artfully-sculpted-silhouette and crisp-white-shirts lady. I just think her character loses something when she has thick crunchy drills laden with caulking for hair.
I much prefer sausage curls on Maribelle. Sausage curls are basically huge unbrushed curls, kind of like jumbo-sized ringlets. Celtic dancing ringlets. This is what Christine did for my Mami wig, which is fucking awesome. Look at it. Look at it!!!! I love it.
So let’s break that down and talk about how we’d do Maribelle’s hair with sausage curls.
Maribelle’s hair is weird. It’s pulled up into “pigtails” but falls around her neck. If you look under her ear on the picture, she has a giant curl sprouting out of the side of her neck. Who the fuck has hair growing out from just under their ear? Maribelle. Anyway: it would look pretty weird if you did her hair just in pigtails, even if I would argue that’s the “intended” look… so I think you’d have to do what Christine calls “Ariana Granding it.” If you’ve ever looked at Ariana Grande and how she does her ponytails (I haven’t) you’ll notice that it’s actually only the top half of her hair that is pulled up… the bottom is still down to make her ponytails look extra full.
And keep in mind that despite her hair being up in a high ponytail AND curled, Maribelle’s hair is still long enough to pass her breasts… this means her hair is easily waist-length. If you Ariana Grande your wig, you’ll want to work with a wig that is meant to be in a ponytail, even if you let the bottom part down, as you’ll still need that clear hairline around it.
So you’d probably want something like Arda’s Jasmine with a ton of extra wefts aaand clip-in bangs. You might just want to get two wigs in the same colour (one Jasmine and something of a similar length but not ponytail); you’ll just cut apart this extra wig and use it for wefts, as it’s cheaper than just buying wefts! You could even do three wigs if you are particularly insane. Christine plans to use FOUR – FOUR FUCKING WIGS?! – to do her Rose Quartz wig from Steven Universe. (I don’t even… what the fuck… my neck hurts just thinking about it…)
So it’ll be a thick as hell wig. It’ll be a heavy wig! But it’s for beauty, and beauty is pain, and that’s what Maribelle would want.
So before you even think about curls, you’ll want to do the following:
sew wig clips into the wig’s hairline.
fill out the wig at the back and bottom with the extra wefts. (This is what we did for Sumia and it was the best decision we ever made.)
Ariana Grande time; pull the top half (including the wig’s natural bangs) up into the pigtails and clip them out of the way.
Now you’re ready to start doing curls on the bottom. We’ll talk about how to do that in a second! Then, after you’ve done the curls on the bottom, you can take down the pigtails and do the same for the top. Then style your bangs, clip them in, aaaand Maribelle should be good to go.
“But Christine,” you whisper, “how do I curl it?”
Now we’re going to point you to a wicked tutorial by Wigging Out With Bobby Z: Curling Synthetic Hair. Watch it. It might give you a better visual idea of what we are doing.
You’ll need the following:
Wig comb + brush. Do not use brushes meant for rooted human hair because they are meant to take out loose hair. You do not want to take out your wig hair unnecessarily because wigs do not grow back. Plastic bristles are great, even if originally for human hair, but proper wig brushes with these weird pyramid bristles are even better.
A few packs of brush rollers like these, but pull the brushes out so you just have the wire coil and the outer shell. Those brushes NEED to be removed because they will FUCK YOUR WIG UP. You’ll want 1 and 1/8″ rollers; Christine isn’t sure that they come any thicker but those will be thick as hell anyway. (She used 1″ on Mami, which looks something similar to Maribelle’s though they hang lower.)
A steamer. If you don’t have access to this, the tutorial linked above will tell you how to use a bowl of boiling water to the same effect, but handheld steamers are only a $40 or so investment and have many many many uses (such as getting wrinkles out of costumes that can’t really be laid down to iron) so just go wild.
Long pins like t-pins. These hold your curlers in. These can also hold your wig to the wig head.
A wig head, and something to hold it up with. You can get wig stands that clamp to the table edge or freestanding ones, but you want one either way. For sure.
Duct tape. This sounds batshit, but Maribelle’s sausages are hella long, so you’re going to be duct taping your brush rollers together end-to-end to make super long rollers. The video linked above will show you how to do this at the 8:00 mark or so.
Got2B Spiking Spray. Use this and your curls will survive any Risen attack. If you cannot locate this, a very high-power hairspray will work, too, though obvs we’re partial to that brand. Don’t worry about cost; wigs are not human hair, so they don’t need magical oils and chemicals meant for human hair. They need glue and shit, and that stuff ain’t fancy at all.
Divide the hair into sections. Presumably you’re working only with the bottom half of the hair right now, as your “pigtail” parts are pulled up and clipped out of the way. Divide the bottom part into sections vertically: depending on how many curls you want (or how many curls Kozaki has drawn that day), this might be 4-6 sections.
You’re going to roll your curls as shown in the video at the 9:00 mark. HOWEVER – have you ever noticed that when you wear your hair in curls, sometimes the curls wrap around each other and become a single jumbo curl or something along those lines? This is because they’re all curled in the same direction. If you don’t want your curls to roll into each other, you have to alternate the direction you roll them in, so 1 to the left, 2 to the right, 3 to the left, etc.
Set it like the video shows you – steam, let dry completely. If you’re not sure if they set properly, steam it again and let it dry completely again. Spray the absolute fuck out of them with the hairspray before you take out the curl. When you take it out, roll it out in the direction of the curl gently. (This is at about the 17 min mark of the video.) Your curl should be pretty much done at this point. If some parts unwrap, gently put them back into place by wrapping them in the direction they’re supposed to be going, and spray that fucker back down.
Repeat for top part of wig for the pigtails. I think you only need 1-2 curls per pigtail on top to look like hers, but depending on how thick you made the wig, you might be able to finagle it either way.
However, the “start” to the pigtails will look weird, as you can’t get the curler in that close, and it will sit funny. Use a blowdryer to gently heat up the root of the ponytail’s curl and set it to the proper place. Let cool. Hairspray the shit out of it. If the base isn’t super clean, it’s not the end of the world. You’ll have a bow sitting on top of it anyway.
That’s how you do it, roughly.
In closing, this got long, and Maribelle will thank you for your dutiful consideration for her ladyship’s impeccable style and tastes.
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