Award season hair has one job that nobody talks about enough: it has to survive the night. Not just the red carpet photos, but the show, the afterparties, the car rides in between. When I sat down to do Desi Lydic's hair for the Emmys, that was the whole brief. Her gown was a structured, backless cobalt blue, which meant the hair needed to be clean enough to show off that neckline and secure enough that neither of us had to think about it again once we left the chair.
I went with a low twisted bun. It's having a real moment right now, and I understand why. A twist reads more polished than a plain bun but it doesn't take the two hours a fully sculpted updo does, and it holds beautifully once it's built section by section instead of rushed as one piece.
Here's how we built it. I prepped the hair with a smoothing serum and a lightweight styling oil, then blow-dried and flat-ironed it for a sleek, uniform base. Texture is the enemy of a clean twist, so this step matters more than people think. From there, I gathered the hair into a low ponytail, split it into two sections, and twisted each one into a loose chignon shape. The twisting is what gives it that structured, almost sculptural look instead of a flat wrapped bun.
The part people usually get wrong is the finish. A twist like this isn't held by the twisting alone, and it's not held by a single pin either. I secured it with around a dozen Min Pins in Dandelion, matched almost exactly to her natural shade, going section by section through the twist. Each one is doing a small, specific job: catching a piece of the shape and locking it against the section underneath. That's the whole logic behind the Min Pins. They're built for detail work, not for anchoring a full bun on their own, so the way you actually get a secure, polished twist is by placing several of them with intention rather than reaching for one pin and hoping.
If your bun or twist tends to slip by the end of the night, the issue is almost never the amount of product. It's usually that not enough is holding it, or the pins that are in there aren't catching the right layers. Each pin needs to go through the base of its section at an angle, catching both the twisted piece and a bit of the hair underneath it, not just skimming the surface. Do that with enough pins across the shape and it stays put for hours.
Color matching mattered just as much here. A dozen pins that catch the light would have pulled focus from the dress and the moment itself. Pins that disappear into the hair let the shape do the talking, which is exactly what I want on a night like that. We color-match Day Rate pins across nine real hair shades for exactly this reason.
This is the same logic the whole Day Rate line is built on. Whether it's a full evening look or something you're doing for yourself on a Tuesday, the goal is hair that looks finished and feels secure, without an accessory that fights the style or damages the hair underneath it.
Shop the Min Pins in Dandelion, or read our full guide to using hair pins in any twist or bun.
