Hair A Book of Braiding and Styles
April 10, 2009 by Hair Styles · Leave a Comment
Hair A Book of Braiding and Styles
A gorgeous book of hairstyles and braids designed for teens and beyond, with styles ranging from formal elegance to casual flair. Comes with three dressy scrunchies in a keepsake floral box.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Book on hair styles is a treasure
HAIR: A BOOK OF BRAIDING AND STYLES is a wonderful guide ot things to do with long hair besides a single brain down the back. Creating these syles on my own hair will take some practice, but the instructions are very good.
4 Stars Good condition
I was very pleased with the book. For being used it was clean and in good condition and most of all it fit my needs. Thank you, Victoria
4 Stars hair book
Has nice picturs and ideas for putting up hair that I was unaware of. I bought it more for my daughter who is getting married.
1 Star Too easy for a pro
This book did not inspire. It contains very dated looks that would be appropriate for a child.
3 Stars It’s okay
I bought this book a looong time ago. Back when I was in elementary/starting middle school, I’m a college freshman now. While I don’t recommend this book for someone who is already familiar with hairstyles, it’s a really good book for those who are younger and just want to learn different styles, it’s great. Some of the looks are a little dated but would look great on little girls who want to play with their hair and some of the looks are simple and elegant. All in all, it’s a good book for the younger ones who want to experiment with simple, easy hairstyles.
Vintage Hairstyling Retro Styles with Modern Techniques
April 10, 2009 by Hair Styles · Leave a Comment
Vintage Hairstyling Retro Styles with Modern Techniques
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Love It!
Loved the book. Several of the styles will be rocked by my bridesmaides in my September ‘09 wedding!
Step by step guides are amazing. Photos are great. I did find one style kinda funny looking but the rest were great!
5 Stars Very useful book
I am doing a 1940’s play and this book has everything in it I need to do the hairstyles for that time period. All color pictures and very detailed instructions.
5 Stars Everything you ever wanted to know!
I have always been confused by the art of curling one’s hair. And the fact that my hair will NOT keep a curl hasn’t helped. I got this book the other day and soo many of my questions have been answered and things make so much more sense now! Not only are there pages and pages of instructions on different curling methods, there are a tonne of different styles with clear instructions for each. At the back there’s even a small section on vintage make-up techniques! I would HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone who loves vintage styles or just needs some help figuring curling techniques out.
Beautiful Braids The Step by Step Guide to Braiding Styles for Every Occasion and All Ages
April 10, 2009 by Hair Styles · Leave a Comment
Beautiful Braids The Step by Step Guide to Braiding Styles for Every Occasion and All Ages
Beautiful Braids (over 700,000 sold) owes its steady success to the simple fact that, as the most affordable and complete book on braiding on the market, it represents incomparable value. From elegant chignons and classic English braids to the sporty Duchess braid, these elaborate styles will continue to turn heads.
User Ratings and Reviews
2 Stars disappointment
I had cancer 2 years ago, and with the chemotherapy came alopecia. I mean I was really bald. I missed my hair so much. When it began to grow back, thick and curly (before baldness I had skinny, straight hair) I started to appreciate and love it. I started to take care of it: no more yanking a comb through it, no more rubber bands on pony tails. I decided never again to cut it, but to grow it forever. The BEAUTIFUL BRAIDS book was intended to help me choose and to achieve “styles for every occasion,” but it didn’t. There weren’t complete instructions nor helpful illustrations. Most of the braided styles looked like those a 10-year-old might create. I can do an English braid. I had wanted help with some styles a little more complicated and interesting. I didn’t get it.
4 Stars Braiding your own hair
If you are braiding someone else’s hair, most of what is here probably won’t help you. However, if you, like I, are trying to learn to French braid your own hair, where you can’t really see what you are doing, this book can help. In fact, I spent part of every evening for nearly 2 weeks with my hands in my hair making knots, and this book in my lap. All of a sudden my hands ‘got it’, and now I can do about any braid I want on myself.
1 Star Lame Braids
Not worth the money. Looks like hand sketches and too wordy for anyone who doesn’t already know how to braid. Poor variety of styles. Book is very small and hard to keep open.
3 Stars braids
it was alright, nothing what i expected. i thought it would be more details, it’s easy braids that i can already do. I wanted to learn cornrows and stuff. it’s ok though
2 Stars this book
In the picture and discriptions on Amazon I feel I was missled
I thought is was a nice big book with nice pictures, or at least thats how they made it seem. When I got it it was just a tiny little black and white book with drawings of braids.
good luck
I will continue to shop at Amozon
Braiding Easy Styles for Everyone Personal Care Collection
April 10, 2009 by Hair Styles · Leave a Comment
Braiding Easy Styles for Everyone Personal Care Collection
Introducing the most extensive book on braiding available-over 40 styles for al hair types, from straight to very curly hair! Beginning with the basics of hair tools, brushes, and accessories, this simple-to-use guide presents braiding techniques from the rope ponytail and chignon to French twists and cornrows. All of the techniques are clearly illustrated with large drawings and detailed photographs to make braiding easy and enjoyable to learn. Written by the best braiders in the profession, you’ll find and create your favorites in the Complete Book of Braiding!
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Braiding: Easy Styles
Great book, easy to read. Lots of information about different hair types and braiding tips. Step-by-step instruction on braiding techniques and braiding styles for all age groups and ethnic backgrounds. If you’re into hair cosmetology this is a must have.
3 Stars This book is ok
This book is ok. It has pretty good diagrams. The downfall of this book is that the African American section is the last 20 pages of the book. I thought this book could have been 50/50.
Queens Portraits of Black Women and their Fabulous Hair
April 10, 2009 by Hair Styles · Leave a Comment
Queens Portraits of Black Women and their Fabulous Hair
Crowns photographer Michael Cunningham and author and journalist George Alexander have captured the marvelous trinity of black women, hair, and beauty salons in the glorious Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair.
Angela Garner says that “The beauty salon is the one great thing we get to share as African American women. It’s therapeutic.” Tisch Sims says that wearing fantasy hair makes her feel “like a goddess, a queen.”
From the afro to the ponytail to dreadlocks to braids to relaxed hair to fantasy hair; from “good hair” to bad hair days, in this stunningly designed book black women from the United States, Africa, and London explore the fascination with hair and beauty that has long been a cherished part of African American culture.
In fifty gorgeous photographs accompanied by vivid, personal narratives, Queens, by turns moving and funny, is the ultimate all-occasion gift book, perfect for Christmas, Kwanzaa, Mother’s Day, and birthdays.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Hair, Hair, Hair, Our Wonderful Hair
It is a proven fact that hair plays an important role in the lives of African American women. Must often our hair or lack of it defines who we are. It is still up for debate whether this is a healthy psychological choice or not. This book is a pictorial guide of the lives of over fifty women and how they feel about their hair. Each woman interviewed talks about the importance of hair, why they wear their particular style, and how their hair has changed during the course of their lives. These women have bleached hair, relaxed hair, natural hair, afros, weaves, braids, and baldheads and they all feel comfortable in with their current styles.
Many African American women use the beauty salon as a safe haven to get away from the world. At the salon you can freely discuss your problems, face your hair issues, and totally change your appearance by revamping your old hairstyle. Hair is your expression of self and how you feel about the world in general. There aren’t many ways that African American women can be free but hair is our crowning glory.
QUEENS: PORTRAITS OF BLACK WOMEN AND THEIR FABULOUS HAIR is a coffee table book that will foster endless discussions of the state of African/African American hair. This is a primer combination of flowing narratives and impressive photos. Be free, be yourself, be bold, your hair is yours not matter the style you rep. Buy this book for yourself, your mom, your sister friend and laugh about all of the hairstyles you’ve rocked!
Deltareviewer
Reviewing for Real Page Turners
3 Stars Locks, Braids, & The Natural.
I Found This Book To Be Quite Interesting. I Enjoy Reading All Of The Various Stories, About All Of The Beautiful Sisters, Wearing Hairstyles Of Their Choice. One Of The Women In The Storie “Lettice ” I Will Call Her “The Silver Fox” Of The Bunch, For Some Reason Or Another Something Just Stood Out About Her.
1 Star Nonreview
I’d like to review this. However, it’s been about six weeks since I ordered it & it hasn’t arrived yet.
3 Stars Another hairdo
In the late ’60s, journalist A’Lelia Bundles waged a battle repeated in many households across the country: she decided to stop pressing her hair and start wearing it in an Afro.
It didn’t help that her father worked for Summit Laboratories, a manufacturer of hair-straightening products. “Who do you think pays the mortgage and tuition?” he demanded.
But Bundles’ consciousness was on the rise. The day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, she was elected vice president of her high school student council, and white parents were threatening to take their kids out of the school.
While this was going on, Bundles was reading W.E.B. DuBois. She was also on the threshold of discovering the legacy of her great-great-grandmother Madame Walker, a pioneering activist, philanthropist and hair products entrepreneur.
“I’m proud to say I have all of my ancestors in my hair,” Bundles writes in “Queens,” a fascinating collection of African-American hair lore. “But in the era I grew up in, people only valued whatever part of your hair that was straight.” She got her Afro.
“Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Fabulous Hair” is the logical successor to photographer Michael Cunningham’s “Crowns.” The earlier book, a collection of stories and images of black church women and their elaborate hats, resonated so deeply with readers it was adapted into a musical production (now running in Lansing at the Riverwalk Theater; see review on p. XX). “Queens” pairs fifty Cunningham portraits with verbal histories, some in the subjects’ own words and some told by co-author George Alexander.
The gatefold of “Queens” depicts an outdoor salon in Ghana, where women and men laugh and talk under a huge tree. The image sets the tone for the mingling of social life and hair that runs through the book.
Cunningham is well positioned document this world; he grew up with his mother and five sisters who turned his home into a salon every Saturday. Later, the photographer notes, “a prerequisite to dating some of the girls in high school was taking care of their weekly salon bills.”
Cunningham’s restless and inventive eye keeps the book’s fifty portraits from becoming monotonous — even those photos meant to convey nobility, dignity and poise have a twinkle or wrinkle that kicks them up a notch. In some of the photos, subject and hair are seen in splendid isolation, while others pull back to reveal the subject at home or in a salon.
But no hair book would be much fun without a wild side, and Cunningham is generous in serving up outrageous visions of self-expression. Tracy Poris, a hairstyling student, wears a vertical do about as tall as a flamingo, with a matching outfit itself made of hair. Angela Williams sports a Mohawk, which tells passersby “I don’t care what you think.” Corene Campbell colors her hair blue “to match her shoes.” Jenelle Byron, a 23-year-old college student from Brooklyn, wears her hair in a literally towering do that mimics the burning World Trade Center, “flames” of curling hair rising from the top floors.
The freaky dos are great fun, but more often, the authors weave images and stories around social and political dimensions of African-American life. “There are no Black stars,” writes Harriett Indira Odei, lamenting the persistent domination of European beauty standards. “They see the white hair and they like it.” Odei is photographed by Cunningham in a Ghanian hair sculpture that defies verbal description (it looks like a windblown beach fence with mossy seaweed curled beneath).
Author Tonya Lewis Lee, whose hair color is gold verging on “carrottop,” recalls her mother rinsing her hair with tea when summer sunshine made it too light and brassy. “You looking too much like massa,” she told her daughter.
Some of the most interesting subjects in the books are hair stylists themselves. Their accounts reveal salons as not only social anchors, but sources of empowerment for both stylist and client. “The hairdo is secondary to having someone focus on them,” says Sonia Mullins of her clients. “These women are busy hustling for the dollar, trying to take care of their families, and they don’t have time to address themselves.”
Whether the end result is whimsical, rebellious, exotic or no-nonsense, “Queens” demonstrated the degree to which self-worth and pride are bound up in these women’s hair.
“When I see myself in an Afro,” says actress Thoundia Bickham, “I feel more powerful.”
Or, as A’Lelia Bundles concludes, “the older I get the more I realize that what endures is ’strong,’ not ‘cute’.”
5 Stars Let’s Talk About Hair Baby
I found “Queens: Portraits of Black Women and Their Hair” to be a wonderful book. I enjoyed the photographs and the stories that went along with them. Hair is such a loaded issue for Black women that it’s refreshing to see a book that glorifies all manner of hair and hair styles. As India Arie sings, “I am not my hair” meaning I am more than my hair. However, there’s a very real part of us that is our hair and Michael Cunningham has captured that part.
