Getting your hair to stay perfectly in place throughout your wedding day isn’t an easy task for anyone — and when you add a tiara to the mix, it’s even harder.
Richard Ward, who did Kate Middleton‘s hair at her 2011 wedding to Prince William, tells PEOPLE that getting a tiara — Meghan wore the Queen Mary Diamond Bandeau tiara — to fit a royal wedding-ready hairstyle is tricky, because they rarely remain totally stationary.
“A tiara like that is very difficult to fit,” Ward says. “The difficulty with tiaras is that they do have a tendency to move around. There would have been a type of elastic band behind the bun at the back, but that won’t necessarily stop the tiara from moving.”
But Ward says that he has a trick to make the royal accessory work, and it’s relatively simple: A needle and some (invisible) thread.
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“The way I would have done it is to do a tiny cornrow plait just behind the center of that stone,” he tells PEOPLE. “With invisible thread, I would sew the front of the tiara into the tiny plait which anchors it, and it will not move.”
Ward is a fan of Meghan’s wedding day hairstyle, an elaborately-pinned up loose bun with tendrils falling at the front.
“It’s a fairly loose chignon with a low bun at the nape of the neck,” he says. “I think that was a good choice because it can look too severe if you show too much neck and the bun is too high. It was very on-trend.”
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He says he had a feeling that Meghan wouldn’t repeat the same hairstyle as Kate (a half-up, half-down ‘do) in an effort to do something different.
“I thought the hair really complimented the dress,” he says. “We did half up, half down on Kate and she wouldn’t want to have something similar. So I knew she would have her hair up.”
However, we still have one more hairstyle to go, as we’ll see Meghan and Harry make their way to their evening reception at Frogmore House later today. Ward says: “Tonight I reckon it will be down and some sort of 1950s wave.”
