Advanced Skills: How to Fake Long Hair Like a Pro

Lorenzo, Stylist at Warren-Tricomi Los Angeles:

We're going to take you through some quick tips on how to fake long hair wear a clip-in hair extension like a pro.

You're going to first start off by smoothing your hair with a blow dryer with a round brush or a paddle brush. Then you can go through your ends with a light hold hair spray or a thermal protectant spray. You're going to want to get your large tooth comb and go through your hair with your flat iron just so you can make sure your ends are sealed.

Now, these are your clip-in long hair extensions. As you can see, I picked a color that's a shade lighter just so you can see the difference between them. Now each clip-in extension has three to four clips in it.

Part your hair yourself to the roundness of your head, kind of in a U-shape. Test it out. Get a mental memory of where the clips are against your head. Tease your hair at the base where the clips are. Now the teasing will help to ensure that the clips will have some cushion and some grip. We picked a shade of extension that was about one to two levels lighter. When you choose an extension, you want to make sure that you match it completely from the base to the ends of your hair color.

Now there are two reasons to use long hair extensions. One is for length and another is for fullness. So we're going to add another row just to be a little bit fuller. Again it doesn't have to be exactly precise. You just want a U-shape around your head. So you hold up the extension to get a mental memory of where the clips are. This one has two at the end and two located more towards the center. Now the extensions that we're putting in we had previously blow-dried and ran a flat iron through them just as we did to the hair itself. A lot of times people tend to curl the extensions, cause it's easier, outside of the hair before putting them in, but what happens is that you'll get a different curl pattern, so you'll always want to make sure to curl them together.

At this point I'm going to spray it again with a little bit of light hold hairspray. I'm going to go ahead and take my 1-inch curling iron and curl them together. This is why we chose to use a shade slightly lighter so you can see that the hair that I'm grabbing is the extension hair and her hair. Just hold the iron there for a few seconds, curling the ends last.

Extensions also come in a different variety. So if you're going to be adding heat to your extensions to help blend them, make sure that they are 100% human hair and not synthetic. If you do include synthetic extensions and they're more towards the nape of your hair, you're going to want to curl your hair on top of it to help blend.

So we're all done curling and this is our finished look for blending extensions like a pro.