Ooh la la, le chignon!

This is simply a fancy way your very good friend might exclaim, “Oh wow, you look gorgeous with your hair in a bun!”

Everything sounds posher in French: chocolat; c’est la vie; un café noir, s’il vous plaît; le weekend. Of course, it’s more enjoyable to annoy your Francophile friends by deliberately mispronouncing the words, par example, ‘cross-ant’ and ‘murky bucup’. However, you do pronounce it 'sheen-yon'.

I like to imagine Madame Bovary wearing her hair in a chignon (she probably did, being French), or Jane Eyre.

This picture actually reminds me of the artwork of a friend of mine, which was an inadvertent result of wanting to show off my Indian silver hairpiece. It is delicate filigree work, and I bought it by weight, which I thought was amusing, but fair. It comes from Zari, a boutique in Swan Street, Richmond.

My hair is quite long, and I like it that way in particular because it gives me the freedom to wear it up in a number of different hairstyles; I rarely wear it out. Occasionally I have an attack of short-hair frenzy and chop it off, but it’s been long for two or three years now. It is also quite fine, so any chignon I create is going to be fairly modest in size; the result above was simply achieved by twirl, twist and pin.

I did experiment a couple of days ago by first teasing my ponytail before twisting it up into a bun, but it very sadly sank all too quickly – like brioche taken out of the oven too early. Obviously I didn’t use enough hairspray. There are some amazing styles out there though; these are just some of them:

Methinks I require the services of a personal maid from Madame Bovary’s day!