Cosplay Step-By-Step | Mercy Wig

This weekend, I spent my entire Saturday documenting styling my Mercy wig. Yikes. I've cosplayed 2 characters in the past with ponytail wigs, and after those two horrible experiences I vowed I would never cosplay a character with a ponytail again. And I didn't - for almost three years! So I found it slightly ironic that I was once again at the mercy (heh) of styling another ponytail. I used an Arda Jeannie in ash blonde.Since there weren't a lot of tutorials out there (especially for total wig styling noobs like myself), I figured I'd document my progress and hope that someone might find it useful! I apologize in advance for the poor lighting (and my pajama top, ha!)MAKING THE PONYTAIL 1:This was honestly the part that took the longest - 5 whole hours. During which I had a breakdown, thinking I'd never be able to do this. But I pushed through! I'm sure I'm an anomaly and this wouldn't take as long for someone else.I took out the ponytail that came pre-packaged and brushed the entire thing out. It's recommended to have a friend help you gather the hair back into a ponytail on your head but I did it myself. It took 4 different tries before settling on the height of the ponytail pictured above. As you can see, it's still a little "baggy" at the bottom but after 5 hours...yeah, I settled. I secured the ponytail with 5 hair elastics.I knew I needed some extra volume in the ponytail for the spikes, so I added 6 extra wefts, 4" wide. I tied them in via elastic, knowing that the elastic and tops of the wefts would be covered later on with a large black fabric band.MAKING THE PONYTAIL 2:Mercy's back ponytail comes to a point in the back with three little spikes at top. Using small elastics, I sectioned the hair into where the spikes would go.To make a spike, flatten the section of hair and snip the hair into a point. I used got2b ultra glued gel to gel the hair into a spike and set it by using a hair dryer. I repeated this basic process until all the spikes were made. For the top 3 spikes I added a little drop of tacky glue to keep the points extra sharp.BANGS PART 1:I started out with the side of Mercy's bangs with the least amount of hair, since her bangs intimidated me ^^ I knew I wanted a bit of hair on the side to cover up where my hairline might show (damn being a thick-haired brunette). To do this, I sewed two wefts to the inside of the wig, right at the hairline. I trimmed them into a point, used the got2be gel, and set with heat.BANGS PART 2:I sectioned most of the bangs over to her right side to use for the larger side of the bangs, and kept a smaller piece to use on the left side. Starting with the "under" layer of the bangs, I started teasing the hair, pretty much with no goal as to how I'd achieve her gravity-defying bangs. I used the hair dryer to coax the roots up and ended up cutting up a paper towel tube to use as a guide for the curl. Then I used hairspray to set the curls, and started to tease some more. And more. Really, I just kept teasing and using heat to get the bangs to lay around the tube.BANGS PART 3:I repeated the above process with the rest of the hair that I'd sectioned off. I tried really hard here to add even more volume to the back of the ponytail so it would "float" above the front section. Not sure if I achieved it but I did use a lot of hairspray...this section was then trimmed shorter and turned into a spike.And there we have it! I still have some work to do taming flyaways and getting rid of hairspray frizz but the overall shape is there. I'm so proud of it! I keep waffling back and forth between making the black neck cover in the back (since I'm doing a casual cosplay) to cover up my hairs that are showing. Do you have any tips for covering those up? I'm not too sure what to do...Anyway, I hope this tutorial helps! If you use it, I'd love to know! Let me know :)