While Mary Poppins Returns takes place in a more recent past, and isn't necessarily considered a true "period" piece, the film's hair and makeup artist Peter Swords King told POPSUGAR that he used a vintage tool dating way further back than you'd think. To get hair reminiscent of the finger waves Julie Andrews wore in the original film, Swords said he used old fashioned methods.
To create the style, King pushed the finger waves into Blunt's hair with his hands, secured them with clips, and dried each section. Then, he used an actual tool from the late 1800s — which looks like a medieval torture device — called Marcel Tongs, to make her hair a bit curlier. This is an early version of a curling iron and has to be heated up on a stove. It was important to King that Blunt's look in the movie look authentic, and said: "You can't recreate any period unless you did what they did in that period."