How to do “victory rolls” in 5 min.
For any woman who has yearned to do their hair in a sweet vintage style, this video clip tells you how. I have not yet tried the technique myself, but after doing battle with my hair on many an occasion, I can tell you that this should work pretty well. The lady in the video, as you will see, has somewhat short hair that does not look very thick and she is able to make it work quite quickly.
What I love about this technique is it does most of the hard hair work in one fell swoop and just some clean up pinning is required from there. The lady does not go into detail at all about how to roll your hair and it does not appear to me that she rolled her hair before showing the technique. If you have time and want to play with rolling your hair to get more body, that’s always helpful in doing vintage rolls… especially for those of us that have thick, heavy hair or a lot of hair.
What I have done before when I need to do a quick vintage ‘do is just spray the heck out of the areas of your hair that you are going to style and that will add some body and stylability to it. Don’t spray it so much that it’s stiff or unbrushable per se, just has some “grit” to it. “Dirty” hair or hair that has any styling product in it is much easier to style quickly than clean hair is. Between this and the technique that this lady shows you, anyone can do a vintage do in mere minutes 
Happy styling and thanks Shelley for sending me the link to this clip!
Update: Looks like the original video embedded below may not be working anymore. However, YouTube has many more vintage hairstyle tutorials.
Absolutely Brilliant! The best I have seen yet. I just spent half an hour trying to do victory rolls, I should have come here first. The others were not nearly so simple nor so fabulous.
Great! Thank you!
I must say I found this video very handy!! Thanks very much. All I need to do now is buy some foam and then I’ll start styling.
Amazing!! This is definitely the easiest tutorial I’ve seen for rolls. Thanks so much!
Where was this last fall when I needed it? My husband is in the Air Force and for the annual Air Force Ball, he was chosen to wear a vintage 40s uniform (and looked sooo dashing!) with 2 days notice – not enough time for me to make an appointment with someone that had experience with vintage hairstyles. I had no problem finding a dress from the 40s (and for a good price at a consignment shop to boot!) but my hair was another problem. After 3 hours of trying myself, I went to a friend and she worked out a hairstyle that was ok, but Id really wanted victory rolls, we just couldnt make it happen. Im bookmarking this JIC were ever in that situation again. Thanks for sharing!
Please help! i love this hairstyle but i have been all over trying to find the rolls you use and can’t find them anywhere, i’ve tried the net ones but as you said they are far too long anny idea’s? Manny Thanks
Hi Trina. Hmmm….I’m not too sure what to tell you, but I understand your problem as I have noticed that the rolls do not seem to be sold at Sally’s anymore (which is where I got my foam roll). However, I do think Sally’s sells bun rolls that maybe you could cut in half to make it work that way. Really anything that has a certain rigidity to it would work so I guess you could get creative and maybe try to take some rollers that are out there and try to make them work. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help
Just found this from a google search on Victory Rolls, and it takes the fear out of the 1940′s hairstyles! Thank you for posting it! My husband and I are doing a show set in 1944, and the hair was rally stumping me, and I didn’t want to spend $40 on a book to show me how to do this!
(BTW- I think that you can use the cheapy foam curlers- the ones with the plastic stick that runs through the middle and clips on one end- for the hair rats. Just remove the plastic part and simply use the foam! I get them at the dollar store 8 for a buck!
Thanks again for sharing this!
Great tutorial, love it (sitting with my curlers already!!). As for the rats, I read somewhere that you can make them yourselves with your own hair. Just collect the falling hair for some time and gather them in hairnets….have done so myself but am about to test this. So for what it’s worth….
@Trina McHugh
Sew your own net thingies with tulle to match your hair color. You can get it at Joann’s Fabricks.
Great video!
For those asking – simply search for foam rollers on Amazon, they have a ton of them.
Hiya Dawn,
I wanted to use your tutorial to practise the victory rolls. But I got a error trying to watch it. But I really liked how you explained every thing.
Is it possible to give me a link that works?
Thanks in advance and regards from rainy Holland.
-Anne
Hi Anne. It seems the author of that video made it private so we’ve updated this post with a link to other vintage hair how-tos on YouTube. I hope you find something equally as helpful as this video was