Cinnamon Buns
Jul. 31st, 2005 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunnyskywalkerOne of the most practical of the impractical Star Wars hairstyles.
Oddly enough, this hairstyle never struck me as ridiculous-looking or unmaneagably impractical. That is a very strange reaction from a girl who usually finds it too much bother to even blow-dry her hair. So, in the spirit of pseudo-scientific inquiry, I decided to analyze this hairstyle more closely.
First, there is the question of how Leia got her hair to stay in those cinnamon buns in the first place. I used to have waist-length hair, and I can tell you, hair is heavy. I once spent well over an hour at a Renaissance Faire hairstyling booth getting an elaborate hairstyle involving ribbons and coils of braids on the back of my head. It took an hour, not because it takes that long to braid hair--the actual braiding took about fifteen minutes--but because it took that long to get enough pins in to make my hair stop falling down. I had enough pins to melt down and make my own metal bikini by the end. So I can guarantee Leia is not holding those cinammon buns in place with a little hairspray. I'll bet she had enough pins to melt down and make a replacement arm and a leg for Threepio if he needed them.
Or did she? I've read that hot wax, if you can get it into your hair, will keep your hair very securely in whatever wild style you've forced it into (though not entirely without help from pins etc.). There are plenty of historical hairstyles as wild as Star Wars ones, so it's at least possible that real hair could get into that style. I also don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in the Star Wars galaxy, the beauty industry is considerably more advanced than our own; perhaps the popularity of gravity-defying hairstyles (as seen in the Outlander Bar, the opera, and even on Tatooine) is a clue that there are widely available and highly effective hairstyling products in the galaxy. If that's the case, then Leia probably got by on the metal bikini-amount of pins--her hair is effectively shellacked into place. (No wonder it's so shiny.)
And if that's the case, then her hairstyle doesn't seem so outlandish. If she could have a meter-high pile of tiny braids sticking straight up, those buns look downright simple. There are no curls, no little wispy bits, no ribbons, no fancy knots. Just part it down the middle, add some Corusca Gem Hair Gel, coil it up, add a few pins, and you're set. It's still more trouble than I would want to go to, but really, it wouldn't be that bad.
It would still take some time to get it all into place, though. That's not good if you're the kind of person who expects your senators to spend their time legislating instead of primping. Still, if her senatorial robe is any indication, she's not spending four hours getting dressed every morning as well, so maybe on the balance it works out.
The major downside is that her hair covers her ears. That much hair has got to muffle her hearing at least a little. For a politician, that doesn't seem practical at all, and it's even less so for any sort of action, where very faint sounds can make the difference between escaping and getting blasted.
Then again, she could have a little ear bud wirelessly linked to tiny microphones hidden in her hair, just to make sure she doesn't miss a thing. That seems a little extreme just to compensate for a hairstyle, but maybe that's actually just an excuse to have hidden microphones in her hair. Maybe she can get secret communications through the ear bud too. Maybe the microphones also connects to a little recording device hidden in her hair. She could pass off any strange readings at security checkpoints as a combination of hairpins and chemical goop, and if anyone finds the microphone, she can explain that she just can't hear through her hair otherwise! The Empire is full of short-haired men who might not know exactly how much hair does or doesn't muffle sound, so she might get away with it...
Come on, if you were a secret Rebel operative and you had a hairstyle like that, wouldn't you try to hide stuff in it?
There are other benefits to the cinnamon buns not found in most of the other unusual Star Wars hairstyles: the style doesn't stick out past her shoulders or above her head, so it won't knock into anything; there's nothing loose that could get caught in the door or grabbed by a pursuing stormtrooper; her hair stays off her neck and out of her eyes; and the buns even act as built-in pillows for catching naps between torture and execution.
Conclusion: it's not the most practical hairstyle, especially for running around the Death Star, but it's not too inconvenient, either, so long as all you have scheduled for the day is sitting on your ship talking politics and picking up transmissions.
Oddly enough, this hairstyle never struck me as ridiculous-looking or unmaneagably impractical. That is a very strange reaction from a girl who usually finds it too much bother to even blow-dry her hair. So, in the spirit of pseudo-scientific inquiry, I decided to analyze this hairstyle more closely.
First, there is the question of how Leia got her hair to stay in those cinnamon buns in the first place. I used to have waist-length hair, and I can tell you, hair is heavy. I once spent well over an hour at a Renaissance Faire hairstyling booth getting an elaborate hairstyle involving ribbons and coils of braids on the back of my head. It took an hour, not because it takes that long to braid hair--the actual braiding took about fifteen minutes--but because it took that long to get enough pins in to make my hair stop falling down. I had enough pins to melt down and make my own metal bikini by the end. So I can guarantee Leia is not holding those cinammon buns in place with a little hairspray. I'll bet she had enough pins to melt down and make a replacement arm and a leg for Threepio if he needed them.
Or did she? I've read that hot wax, if you can get it into your hair, will keep your hair very securely in whatever wild style you've forced it into (though not entirely without help from pins etc.). There are plenty of historical hairstyles as wild as Star Wars ones, so it's at least possible that real hair could get into that style. I also don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in the Star Wars galaxy, the beauty industry is considerably more advanced than our own; perhaps the popularity of gravity-defying hairstyles (as seen in the Outlander Bar, the opera, and even on Tatooine) is a clue that there are widely available and highly effective hairstyling products in the galaxy. If that's the case, then Leia probably got by on the metal bikini-amount of pins--her hair is effectively shellacked into place. (No wonder it's so shiny.)
And if that's the case, then her hairstyle doesn't seem so outlandish. If she could have a meter-high pile of tiny braids sticking straight up, those buns look downright simple. There are no curls, no little wispy bits, no ribbons, no fancy knots. Just part it down the middle, add some Corusca Gem Hair Gel, coil it up, add a few pins, and you're set. It's still more trouble than I would want to go to, but really, it wouldn't be that bad.
It would still take some time to get it all into place, though. That's not good if you're the kind of person who expects your senators to spend their time legislating instead of primping. Still, if her senatorial robe is any indication, she's not spending four hours getting dressed every morning as well, so maybe on the balance it works out.
The major downside is that her hair covers her ears. That much hair has got to muffle her hearing at least a little. For a politician, that doesn't seem practical at all, and it's even less so for any sort of action, where very faint sounds can make the difference between escaping and getting blasted.
Then again, she could have a little ear bud wirelessly linked to tiny microphones hidden in her hair, just to make sure she doesn't miss a thing. That seems a little extreme just to compensate for a hairstyle, but maybe that's actually just an excuse to have hidden microphones in her hair. Maybe she can get secret communications through the ear bud too. Maybe the microphones also connects to a little recording device hidden in her hair. She could pass off any strange readings at security checkpoints as a combination of hairpins and chemical goop, and if anyone finds the microphone, she can explain that she just can't hear through her hair otherwise! The Empire is full of short-haired men who might not know exactly how much hair does or doesn't muffle sound, so she might get away with it...
Come on, if you were a secret Rebel operative and you had a hairstyle like that, wouldn't you try to hide stuff in it?
There are other benefits to the cinnamon buns not found in most of the other unusual Star Wars hairstyles: the style doesn't stick out past her shoulders or above her head, so it won't knock into anything; there's nothing loose that could get caught in the door or grabbed by a pursuing stormtrooper; her hair stays off her neck and out of her eyes; and the buns even act as built-in pillows for catching naps between torture and execution.
Conclusion: it's not the most practical hairstyle, especially for running around the Death Star, but it's not too inconvenient, either, so long as all you have scheduled for the day is sitting on your ship talking politics and picking up transmissions.