Creating and caring for hair rats

A beautiful friend of mine asked me to explain how to make a hair rat this morning, and being the crazed hair fanatic that I am I happily obliged!

Traditional hair rats are bundles of your dead hair wrapped in various shapes to add volume and definition to hairstyles where your natural hair is too thin. They can be used for bumper bangs, pompadours, victory rolls, page-boy do's, Edwardian coifs, and so much more. They've been around since the Victorian era, used to symbolize both health and wealth through big hair that was sometimes also filled with horse hair.

There are people that will argue that authentic hair rats are undesirable (they certainly aren't the prettiest things ever), but really there are huge benefits to using your own hair as filler. Not only does it blend much better with your actual hair (making it impossible to tell that you're cheating), it's also much more eco friendly than foam or nylon substitutes. Below this is a link for those anyway.

So here's the essential question: How do you make a hair rat?

It's simple! Instead of cleaning out your hair brush like you would normally do, let the hair collect until your brush is full of hair. I prefer a round brush, but really any brush will work.

You will need a pair of scissors, your brush, a rattail comb, and 1-2 bobby pins {or you can sew these shut). The red phallus looking beast is a previous roll that I'm building onto.

Make an incision down one side of the bristles if you're using a round brush.

Use the end of a rattail comb and pop the hair out in columns

Keep pulling!

You'll develop a square shape once you're finished.

(I use dry shampoo on both my hair and the hair for rats. Hense the lint looking things on my brush. You can use dry shampoo to clean out your rats, but they're going to look the same as mine.)

Once you have that, roll it into an oblong shape, sewing or pining it closed.

(Looks kind of like a hot dog, huh?)

It will ALWAYS look really gross, and it will either bother you or it won't. Again, mine look this way simply because of dry shampoo =] This is one of the reasons people decide against authenticity and go for the synthetic rats.

You can mold this by either rolling it between a flat surface and your palm, or by building onto it with more hair. You can make it as thick or as thin as you'd like, whatever works for your style.

You can also pull hair off of your brush, squish it into a puff ball and use an invisible hair net (or hair matching hosiery) to mold your end result.

Either way, keep your finished product away from cats as they have a magnetic pull to destroy them whenever these are left unattended.

If natural creeps you out for whatever reason, there are alternatives:

** Foam buns: These usually only come in brown, black, and yellow. They secure well and are pretty long once they're cut. (To do this, just cut at the seam and trim to size)

** Synthetic hair stuffed into nylon or hair nets.

** Teasing the hair that's already on your hair, forming a bun, and then building off of that.

The above picture is a bumper bang. It was achieved by a single sized hair rat after setting my bangs in large rollers for about an hour.