This Easy Hairstyle Is Perfect for Summer Weddings

First, a rundown on the updo. Wood's description of the model's hair twist sounds like literally the easiest thing in the world: "I started off on one side coiling and twisting her hair away from her face. I would then stick a pin in and continue twisting, trying to keep it irregular," he says. Moving to the other side, he coiled and pinned in a different pattern, then twisted up the ends and intertwined them "to create this really easy, organic, not over-styled shape."

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Beautiful. But could I, a hair buffoon, recreate the mermaid-emerged-from-the-sea look? Short answer: Amazingly, yes! Kind of. The more I look at my photos, the more it reads alien princess. But in a freak turn of events, it was actually as easy as it sounded.

Wood says he made the gorgeous, multisize pearl pins by hand (comment after comment asked where to buy them. Alas! But these are similar). The process sounded not-horrible—using fake pearls, bobby pins, cream-colored thread, and a glue gun, he tied the pearls onto the pins, then glued them for extra security. All told, he says, the process took him about four minutes per pin.

Wood sourced his pearls from Toho Shoji, a trim shop in New York's Garment District, but I headed to Michael's and got everything for about $30. Making the bobby pins was actually pretty therapeutic—following Wood's directions, I made 20 in one and a half episodes of 30 Rock. Skip the thread step, your eyes will thank you.

And now the fun part, the twist itself. By fun, I mean disastrous on the first three attempts. While Wood's pearls logically gave a detailed visual guide to where each pin should go, my thick, curly hair wasn't having it—his offhand twists looked spontaneously beautiful and undone, but my barely affixed sections looked insane. The whole vibe was very Cindy Lou Who.