I get asked about the clips more than anything else, which is funny because it is genuinely the lowest-effort part of the whole thing. There's no technique. There are three rules and about ninety seconds of work.
Clean hair is the enemy
Clips need something to bite. Freshly washed hair is smooth, light, and has nothing for a small metal spring to hold onto, so it slides out within the hour and you conclude the clips are bad. The clips are fine. The surface is wrong.
Day two is ideal. If you have to work with clean hair, a bit of texture spray or dry shampoo at the roots gives you the grip you're missing. Not product on the lengths — at the roots, where the clip is actually closing.
Fold, then close
The mistake with small snap clips is clamping them onto a flat sheet of hair. Nothing holds. Take a small section, twist it once or fold it back on itself, and close the clip over the fold. Now it's gripping a bundle instead of a plane and it will stay there all day.
For the bigger claw-style ones you want the opposite — those need volume, so scoop rather than pinch, and let the clip sit at an angle rather than perfectly horizontal.
Odd numbers, uneven sides
Three on one side and two on the other looks intentional. Three and three looks like a uniform. Symmetry is the thing that makes it read as costume rather than style, and it's the difference between the two versions of this that people can't articulate when they say one looks better.
Cluster them rather than spacing them evenly down the side. A tight group of three near the temple with one stray further back does more than five evenly distributed, which just reads as a row.
And use more than feels reasonable. Two clips looks like your hair was annoying you. Five or six looks like a decision.
What I actually own
Small metal snap clips in a colour that isn't trying to match my hair — that's most of them. Pearl ones for when I want it softer. A couple of butterfly clips because I'm a certain age and I can't help it.
None of it is expensive. The clips in most of my content came in a bag of thirty for less than a coffee, and I lose them constantly, which is the actual reason I buy them that way.
Texture, fold, odd numbers. That's the whole post. You can stop watching tutorials about it now, including mine.
Come see the rest ✧
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