I've saved probably two hundred hair tutorials. I do three things. This is a normal amount of self-awareness, I think, and at this point I've stopped pretending the other one hundred and ninety-seven are happening.
Down with the bangs doing the work
Ninety percent of days. Curtain-ish bangs, everything else left alone, maybe some texture spray at the roots so it isn't flat.
The trick with bangs is not brushing them once they're dry. Every time you touch them they separate into sad little clumps. Set them in the morning and then leave them alone like an adult.
If they do separate, don't add water — that resets the whole thing and you'll be there for fifteen minutes. A tiny bit of dry shampoo at the roots and a quick shake with your fingers fixes it about eighty percent of the time.
I dry them first, before the rest of my hair, while they're still damp enough to take a shape. Bangs left to air-dry go wherever they want and they will not be negotiated with later.
Space buns for when I want to feel something
Takes four minutes and completely changes the energy of an outfit. Slightly uneven is better than perfectly symmetrical — symmetrical reads costume, a little off reads like you did it yourself in the mirror, which you did.
I leave a couple of face-framing pieces out. Non-negotiable. Without them it's severe in a way that fights with soft makeup.
Placement is the thing people get wrong: too high looks like a cartoon, too low looks like an accident. Roughly in line with the outer edge of your eyebrow, following your head's curve, is the range that works.
Second-day hair holds these far better than clean hair. Clean hair slips out of everything and I'll be redoing them within the hour.
The claw clip
Not really a hairstyle. But it's what happens on days when I still want to look put together and I have eleven seconds.
Twist, clip, pull two pieces loose at the front. Genuinely undefeated. It looks deliberate in a way a ponytail somehow doesn't, and it keeps everything off your face while filming.
Get a clip slightly too big for your hair rather than slightly too small. The small ones fail at the worst possible moment and take a chunk of hair with them.
What I stopped doing
Heat every day. My hair got noticeably worse and the styles didn't look any better. Now it's heat maybe once a week and air-dry the rest, and it holds shape better than it did when I was straightening it constantly.
I also stopped washing it daily, which took an unpleasant few weeks to settle and then just — worked. Everything on this list holds better on hair that isn't freshly washed anyway.
And I stopped trying to make my hair do things it structurally won't. Mine won't hold a curl past about two hours no matter what I put on it. Fighting that was years of wasted mornings.
Three styles, none of them hard. The tutorials are fun to watch but the ones you repeat are the ones you can do half-asleep, and those are worth more than a complicated look you attempt twice a year.