#note: it's all a bit handwavy because I still change things around. gotta sit down and properly map out her hairstyles on the timeline lol

[mistfallengw2]

*peeks around your door*

Can you tell us about Aurelia's haircare routine?

Tl;dr: her haircare routine is a mess that tries to be functional, just like her.

For most of her time in the Legions, her routine with hair used to be cutting it short frequently and just... not really dealing with it beyond general fur hygiene. Fur already ends up getting matted with all sorts of grime and bloody bits during battles, and that's already a lot of effort to take care of during deployment on the frontlines. Maintaining a long mane makes it even worse, with the added malus of it being a safety hazard, especially against Flame Legion. Aurelia was far from unkempt, but it took one time of her letting it grow longer and stinky while on a long mission, then being power-washed by her elementalist mate made the routine stick hard.

The only exception was during the year and a half when she was pregnant with Adamas and reared him. The warband was on break from active duty due to their Legionnaire needing a long recovery from the wounds obtained during a mission that nearly ended in disaster for them all, so there was a lot of guarding and patrolling in uneventful safety for many months. Aurelia's mane grew longer since she had no reason to cut it, so Ardea started taking care of it for her and braiding it out of boredom, which eventually led to the first learning the tricks to keep it nice and clean even on the battlefield (feeding a cub has roughly the same effect on a smaller scale). Still, once Aurelia returned to active duty and her cub joined the fahrar, the rest of her mane was cut short again (it took two bloody battles to make her feel like she was wasting time), with the exception of the little braid on the side of her face that was first made by Adamas.

Any sort of haircare routine went out of the window during her years in the Mists, and she came out of there with the worst tangled mess imaginable. During her stay at Markus's mother's farm, they opted to shear that matted mop off of her head after a miserable attempt at washing and combing it out. Aurelia was completely out of it and did not remember anything, but she asked the kid to save the remnant of the little braid and redo it. A wee timeskip later, she had her mane cut short again when she returned to the Vigil, then she kept it presentable as it grew out during the whole Pact thing. On various people's suggestions (mostly about improving the Commander's image), she still trimmed her mane every now and then, but it was left a bit longer each time. She never did anything special, just quickly washed with what was available and brushed it, because any time spent with her own thoughts was highly uncomfortable. She occasionally let Adamas or Ellara help her out, both because they had better haircare routines than her and because company kept bad thoughts away.

Going through a murderous jungle made Aurelia kinda want to rip her mane out along with all the leaves, branches and sap that ended up in there, but she was convinced to give braiding a try. She still wanted to cut it all off, but her slowly improving mental state allowed her to adapt more easily to taking care of it properly, and she had to concede that it was a comfortable alternative. By S3 (in my headcanon it starts a year after HoT) she had more complex braids, and in S4 (after salvaging what wasn't seared to a crisp) she started gathering all her mane in one bigger braid, switching styles every once in a while and keeping it at a comfortable length.

In all of that, Aurelia never really developed a proper "routine", as any particular product or tool suggested to her had a tendency of getting lost or forgotten somewhere within a few months at most, and during Commander duty time for personal care was limited. Her mane was always fairly healthy and thick, so she never really needed to do much about it.