Post by Melissa
I have a few confessions I feel I need to make to remain honest to you all, so here they are in no particular order.
1) Sometimes, I really wish I wore a sheitel. (The lack of sheitel wearing is a totally separate post.)
1.5) So much so that I almost bought a curly ponytail clip on thing today…. I just feel like this would make life easier when at community fancy events in a community where having my head covered is like a beaming light on the token religious girl.
2) How I chose to cover my hair, is my business only. Maybe a little bit my husbands because he did acquire my hair after all. I’m pretty sure that its written into my ketubah 
3) While I do find covering to be meaningful and wonderful, I also get crazy headaches, so if I have my scarf wrapped funny or what seems like an odd hat on, don’t bug me about it. I probably had to do the best I could today.
4) I hate having to put clips, bobby-pins, etc in my hair to hold on a scarf. It goes with (3) and only makes headaches worse. So my recent find of slip-resistant scarves from The Style Underground (as shown in the above photo) was amazing.
5) I have grown to love snoods and similar styled hats. They are fast and easy and awesome, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks of them!
5) That said, the first thing I do when I walk into my apartment is pull my scarf/snood/hat off my head. So if I am out and about and suddenly decide I need to go home {or sometimes even just to the bathroom}, you have about a 75% chance of that being because I need to get my head free.
Phew, I feel better now. Anyone have any confessions to add?
Tags: confession, hair covering, hat, Judaism, marriage, Modesty, sheitel, snood, tichel, Tzniut, Women
Great post! I want the next one to be about why you don’t wear a sheitel… that is my plan when I get married. A billion sheitels and tons of hats and tichels… okay maybe not a billion, they are expensive.
Ask and ye shall receive…. Next Wednesday – Life without a Sheitel…..
I feel the same way. As soon as I walk into my house my hair covering comes off. I also get headaches. I have a Sheital, but I rarely wear it as it gives me a headache. I usually wear snoods (which my husband loves) and barets. Luckily I work in an environment where I can wear something other than a sheital. I love covering my hair, as well as the reasoning behind it, but it sometimes gets to me.
D was very opposed to snoods until I found some very nicely crocheted ones, but now he misses scarves…. We just can’t win, huh?
I have solved the slip problem, and also the problem of wearing tichels in fabrics other than cotton, by wearing a cotton under-scarf. I make them in a shape to fit my head like a cap, and make a “bun” on the back to wrap the outer tichel around, as I always wear tichels wrapped in a bun style. I used to wear shaitels very rarely, but gave up on them a few years ago – I could never tell how they were going to look on any particular day, and then the Indian hair thing came up. And I’m getting older, but shaitels with some silver in them are hard to find. I’m not going to be one of those old bubbies trying to fool the world in a 20-year-old woman’s hair – it just makes them look older.
Brilliant!
Thank you so much for the shout-out! The white eyelet scarf looks great on you.
Looking forward to your ‘Life Without a Sheitel’ post. Thank you for creating this brilliantly-written blog.
Absolutely! Thank you for such fabulous head coverings… I love that scarf and can’t wait to see what else you have up your sleeves from that pretty fabric you posted a few days ago!
Now you’ve got me on a hunt for cotton voile! (if lining scarves with this magic fabric makes them slip resistant, I want to try it out
)
I own a couple of sheitels, but rarely wear them – they give me headaches, and make my psoriasis itch like crazy. I mostly wear berets to work, it’s a casual workplace, so that’s okay. But recently I’ve tried out scarves, and have gotten nothing but compliments.
Oh man, I hadn’t even thought of the itchy factor!
Great timing on this post, because I just today got my latest Style Underground order in the mail. I love their stuff so much – it’s worth the extra money because it’s so well-made, they don’t slip, and they’re so much prettier than what I can get locally. I occasionally buy scarves at Target and I used to buy a lot from CoverYourHair.com but their stuff is made very shoddily, so I think I’m going to save my money and spend it on higher-quality stuff from Style Underground and other craftspeople. Quality over quantity, ya know? My favorite item that they carry is the Juliette hat, which I wear like a snood. I also look forward to hearing about life without a sheitel!
I have migraines so I fear when I start covering full-time I’m going to deal with pain if I wear things that are too tight. Not sure what to do about that.. I think snoods and berets are easier than scarves in this regards because they don’t have to be so tight.
I too am a CoverYourHair convert
When you approach the full time hair covering, send me an email. I’d be happy to talk to you about ways to avoid migraines. You are doing the best thing now though in preparation, which is finding out what works… I spent months before my wedding building up to having things on my head full time, and am so grateful that I did. While I still inevitably bought pieces that didn’t work out, I think I wasted much less money than I may have otherwise.
Please, if you have any ideas on how to avoid migraines, post them here. Migraines and head covering do not blend well!
I make a lot of my scarves because I just can’t seem to find scarves in fabrics I like, and if I do, they aren’t square or large enough. 1 1/4 yards is just about right for one tichel. I live in New York and haunt the fabric stores in the “shmatte” district. Scarves don’t have to be individually lined if you wear a cotton underscarf, and they don’t need to be washed as often. That wrinkly kind of cotton that some Indian clothes are made of is a perfect non-slip fabric for underscarves. And if the top scarf still slips a little (you just couldn’t resist that shiny fabric!), you can pin it to the bottom scarf.
I think I’ll take some time to reflect back on my past year and what I found to work and write a post in the next few weeks! So stay tuned fellow migraine sufferers!
I’m glad I found your blog if for no other reason than getting that link.. just kidding , I am finding it interesting too. So far I have one tichel from coveryourhair.com and love it for the same reason, doesn’t slip. I have very fine hair and I’m always pulling on my scarves (when I wear one, that’s a long story).
I’m always happy to help! If you have luck with the plain cotton one not slipping, you’ll do great with the ones from Style Underground! (I promise, I get nothing for all my promoting of her! I just truly love her products)
LOL Understood… I do that w/ a few stores myself. Looks like we commented at the same time just now too
Apologies (I tend to overthink things lol) if that came across wrong. By the whole I find it interesting thing I meant – I am extremely interested in reading about religions… I kind of go in spurts where I’m interested in learning more about one religion or another (besides my own I mean) and yours has been the latest since I found out that my family was a lot more recently than I thought. Anyways I was excited to see your blog when I found it. I hope you don’t mind a random Maronite Catholic reading it from time to time
This echoed my thoughts and experience entirely (I’m also a rebbetzin). What a relief to find that I am not alone. Especially about the headaches. Let’s not even mention the eczema ….
Glad it hit home, though I am sorry on the headaches and such.
(And I am not yet a Rebbetzin… its still a future goal)
Gosh. This is the only thing that scares me when I think of getting married. I am still working on myself to get used to the fact that I’ll have to cover my hair and wear ugly scarves or sheitel, which may not be that ugly but no woman looks pretty in them anyway.
You will be as ugly or as beautiful as you empower yourself to be. I know plenty of women who look radiant in their head-coverings, it just takes some time to figure out what will work for you!
It’s funny- I had almost the opposite reaction. I’ve worn some sort of head covering for years, and looked forward to getting married so that I could cover more of my head/hair, since I think it looks pretty. But then, I don’t cover every since inch, so I get that frame of an inch or two of hair by my forehead, which makes it easier, at least for me. I’d encourage you to play around and find styles that suit you- I’m sure there will be some. Then it can be a change, rather than a disappointment.