1817 Gold Stripes And Face Framing Curls

Back in February, I was able to re-wear my 1817 Gold Stripe Duchess Gown to The Commonwealth Vintage Dancers’ annual Regency Ball.

I love this dress! The sheer fabric is unusual to see in modern recreation settings and has lots of body, making for a lovely shape that is fun to dance in. It turns out that the gold stripe is rather neutral, so I’ve had fun accessorizing it in different ways this spring. We’ll start with this wearing, but there’s another one to blog about as well!

This time I decided to add a bit of color to the dress by adding a wide chartreuse organza sash with a simple bow in the back and rather long ends. (I’m all for variation in ribbon sashes for Regency dresses. In fact, I wrote a post detailing different sash styles a number of years ago!)

I also added lovely new jewelry from In The Long Run Designs. The color I chose, jonquil, is a light yellow color . It compliments my skin tone and adds quite a bit of neutral-toned sparkle to my ensembles (the goal was to match as many dresses as possible so I can get the most use out of the set).

The day of the ball I thought I had lots of time and so I decided on a whim to do a complicated hair style with face curls. It turns out I was off by an hour but I didn’t realize it until I was in the car! Thankfully I arrived in time and didn’t cause anyone else issues with my lateness. Oops! But I was very pleased with my hair (and the fact that it was done before I arrived to get dressed definitely helped offset the fact that I was late).

The hairstyle is directly inspired by the following image of Maria Leopoldine of Austria from 1815 (source). I have a note that it was painted by Friedrich Johann Gottlieb Lieder but I can’t find documentation for that detail outside of my note-to-self. Maria Leopoldine caught my eye because I love big braid buns (my hair does volume so well!) and I thought it was high time to try face curls again (see my 2014 attempt and a different narrower circumference of curl in 2016 to see other attempts I’ve posted about).

So off I went with a curling iron to try and reproduce this hairstyle. Given that I thought I had lots of time, I even took photos of the process so I could share it with you!

Let me start by saying that yes, even though my hair is curly I still use a curling iron (or other curling method) to get precise curls. To show the difference, here’s my hair at a partially done stage. You can see the curling iron curls to the left of my forehead and chin with my natural curls being held sideways in between them and on the right side of my face.

How did I get to that point? I’ve determined that great looking historical hairstyles are often styled in many parts. The complicated thing about face framing curls with my hair is that it’s all quite long: past my shoulders when it’s curly and almost to the middle of my back when it’s straight. I don’t have short lengths around my face to curl, so I have to fake it with long lengths that are pinned up to be shorter.

To begin, I split each half of my hair into sections–a front top section, a back top section, a section behind my ear, and the rest of the hair on the back of my head. In the photo above, I’ve already used the curling iron to curl the top back section of hair, pinned up some of the length, and used the front top section of hair to smooth out and cover up the pinned up length. I’ve also curled the back section behind my ear and pinned the curls up to shorten them as well. The rest of the hair is being held out to the side so you can see the different sections I’m referring to.

I realized after taking that photo that I should show a better example of what all of those words mean. So in the next photo I’ve let go of the back section and put a loose hair tie around it to keep it separate from my nicely curled sections. And I’ve curled the back top section of the other side of my hair, but I haven’t pinned those curls up to shorten or arrange them. I’m holding the front top section up in the air so you can see how untamed the curling iron curls look before being arranged.

The curls are the hard part. After arranging the top front sections and pinning them down around the back of my head it was a matter of wrapping and pinning up the back sections to look nice and make a big bun on the top of my head. I’m pretty sure I used a big bun form under there (the medium one from my Versailles hair in 2016–and for reference that post pretty clearly shows how long my hair is–it’s great for volume but can be a lot to wrangle), but it’s hard to remember as that was now almost three months ago and I didn’t take photos of those steps!

The final step was to wrap and pin my trusty (and yikes, 15 years old!) faux braid around the bun and give the whole thing a liberal dose of hairspray!

I love that I’ve found a new look for this dress and a new historical hairstyle. Looking at the photos, it doesn’t look like my braid bun is quite as large or wide as Maria Leopoldine’s (I’ll have to try again someday!). Despite that, I was very pleased with the face framing curls and the bouncing curls behind my ears. The style felt very regal!