I bought the Babyliss Pro Curl 230 Tong a few weeks before my birthday as a little present to myself, so I've had it now for about 6 weeks. In that time I've gone from a complete novice and spending about 45 minutes trying to get my hair to look 'right', to being able to do my whole head and extensions in about 20. Not bad!
In these 6 weeks I've definitely mastered the art of: section-hold-wrap-wait-release! I feel like I couldn't live without this now.. Oh dear.
It manages to give me different looks because of the way the curls turn out. I can create a volumised curly look, a relaxed beach waved look and also a full on ringlet look. Not bad for something that costs £25!
Let's get the technical stuff out of the way first, so, it heats up to 200°C and has 4 different heat settings to choose from. Not only that but it is ready to use in 30 seconds. I've known some stylers to take aaaaaages and if i'm in a rush that is definitely one of my niggles. With this though, by the time I've sectioned my piece of hair and combed it through the conical is pretty much raring to go. Wahey!
I bought mine from Next online and it came with a 3 year guarantee, so I feel better knowing that i'm covered just in case anything goes wrong in that time. Which is always a good thing, when hair appliances can sometimes be so temperamental!
The general way to use a conical wand is to section your hair into different sizes (just to make it look more natural) and start from the bottom of your head then going upwards. Start with the furthest section away from you each time, this way you will be able to see what you're doing! If you do it the other way you'll find it harder to see past your wonderful curls!
So with each section of hair you want to wrap the hair (I usually do this away from myself) around the conical (leaving a couple of inches free at the scalp) and gently wrap the hair around the wand until all or most of the hair is around it. Be careful not to burn your fingers or ears though! It will hurt like a bugger! Once you've waited long enough (depending on your hair type and heat setting you've got it on) you just need to release the hair. And voila! Lovely curls!
Okay, so what I'll do now is i'll show you a picture of each of those 3 looks I can achieve and explain how I created them..
As you can see.. volumised! Wow. This isn't even me wearing extensions! I nearly couldn't fit all my hair in my laptop screen and that's saying something!
To achieve this, I repeated the general steps above but rather than leaving a chunk of hair free near my scalp I would curl all the way up - taking extra care not to burn my scalp! After each section was released I lightly sprayed it with hairspray. Once my whole head was done, near my crown I gently backcombed to give more height and volume. As you can see, it works!
Excuse the face.. haha, but this is the ringlet look I can create with the wand. This is what you can do with a bog standard curler, but it makes me happy that the wand can do it as well haha. I followed the general steps with this one also, but this time when wrapping my hair around the wand I kept all the hair tightly packed together as I went around. The tighter the wrapping = the tighter the curl. Very ringletty indeed!
And this is the relaxed beach wave look! This is probably my favourite and it's also the easiest - hoorah! As with the other two looks, I followed the general steps but this is really just the opposite of the ringlet look. This time you want to leave more space at the scalp AND at the ends of your hair. When the hair goes around, you want to leave wide spaces in between each wrap. Loose wrap around = loose curls.
So here's a little close up of the curls created - very soft and natural looking in my opinion. And most importantly easy to do once you get the hang of it! So don't give up and keep trying :)
What do you think? How have you gotten on with a conical wand?
