babyliss boutique soft waves :: review

if you read my 'h is for hair' post, you'll know i'm pretty much a hair up or hair down kind of girl. i don't faff about. which is why, when asked "would i like to try the babyliss boutique soft waves curling tong*?" i said yes. i said yes, because i would like to be good at doing hair. i said yes, because i am kinda sorta almost bored of having a fringe and want to try something new. i said yes, because i thought - nay, hoped, that it would be easy. say, as easy as suzy here makes it out to be.

clearly, this particular babyliss product was designed with lovely long locks in mind, so was mostly wasted on my quite layered shoulder-length hair. i followed the instructions and wrapped the length of the section of hair around the barrel, starting at the bottom and finishing at the cool top, but really only managed to wrap my hair twice before i... well, ran out of hair.

thank god for the handy rubber glove - if not for that i would have burned my fingers clean off trying to hold the ends in place while the hair was heating. there are four heat settings in total, and i had it on the highest two of four, as my hair is quite thick and any heat will usually drop pretty quickly. the tool heated up (and cooled down) really quickly, which was excellent, because there's nothing worse than having to wait around to get started. 

i'm so unfamiliar with hair styling tools (despite buying and never using another curling tong last year) - i kept accidentally turning it off while i was curling; the on/off button lives right where my thumb would naturally sit, so it kept "not working" and i kept "not knowing why it wasn't working". in theory,  it should have been pretty straight forward. in reality, i am very uncoordinated. watching the video, i thought "i can do this, no sweat!". then i turned the bastard on, and almost burned my face off. i just couldn't get the hang of simply facing the tool downward. i complained to boyfriend that my arm was too tired. naturally, he told me to stop complaining.

so this is the final result. it's hard to see, i'm sorry, i know. it looked a lot better in real life, but i couldn't take a decent picture (and boyfriend was too busy playing fifa to help) of the waves. i managed to get one side looking pretty wavy, while the other side looked... odd. with some practice and longer hair (and some patience), i think i could nail this, although it's certainly not going to become part of my daily routine. i think with a bit of backcombing and half hair up, some soft waves around my face would look fab for kim's wedding, so i will keep my hopes high and my hair un-cut for then - and i will, of course, keep you duly posted.

have you tried this product before? what's your hair routine like?