Curly hair stuff is of interest to some, I know. Because I washed my hair today, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, I thought I'd share briefly my very non-influencer thoughts about curly/wavy hair and things that help my hair.
As I might have mentioned before, I've been more or less in the Curly Girl loop for more than a decade. When my oldest daughter was a teenager, we cut her hair, which until that day we had thought was just, you know, a lot of hair, in lovely princess waves. We cut a lot of length off, and to our surprise, and her frank dismay, that hair sprang up in a gigantic red triangle of . . . curls. Like coily curls. Really tight coily curls.
I forget now how we managed to stumble on this whole Curly Girl thing, but fast forward 10+ years, and she still washes her hair with silicone-free conditioner and nothing else. I think she probably still only combs it when it's wet, or when she needs to separate it to braid or something. She does otherwise treat it pretty much just like any hair, not like a headful of fine china –– when it's long, which it has been for most of her adult life, she mostly wears it in a ponytail or a bun. But it's gorgeous hair, and she's learned how to help it be its best, with relatively gentle treatment (though in college her friends did like to straighten it with a flat-iron from time to time, just to see what it would look like) and the right handling to keep it from separating into a massive cloud.
My hair is not that curly. At its curliest, I have the kind of long S-shaped thing going on, with waves that sometimes end in ringlets and sometimes don't. No matter what I do, this seems to be the hair I have. I've come to disbelieve that you can Curly-Girl your hair into being something it's not –– I see pictures of people's "progress," where their hair keeps getting curlier and curlier and curlier and curlier and curlier, with captions that say, Keep Going!, as if you were doing power-lifting or a Couch-to-5K course. Certainly the healthier your hair gets, the more its best natural self it's going to be, but it seems to me that there comes a time when you have to confront that it's not going to metamorphose into completely other hair than the hair you kind of already had. I also utterly disbelieve that you can train your hair to be curly. Hair isn't sentient or even animate. It has no memory. It doesn't care whether you straightened it yesterday or not. You really can't either create a curl pattern you don't have or destroy a curl pattern you do have. Get your hair wet, and whatever texture you had will come back. Get your hair healthy, and it will assume that texture with a flourish. Learn some techniques to help encourage and hold that texture and pattern, and you can start to expect, on a reliable basis, that your hair will look the way you want when you want it to. But don't bother thinking you can put your hair through obedience school, because you can't. And don't worry that you're going to derail its progress, because see above. The only thing that gets trained in this whole process is you, which on the whole is really not bad news.
So. This is my hair. I got it cut . . . about a month ago, I think? I typically get it cut no more than two or three times a year. In the photo above you can see the kind of cut I ask for when I go in: tapered, with blended layers. You can also see the variation in curl patterns, most notably that my top layers are a lot curlier than my under-layers. And that just is what it is. The healthier my layers are, the more even the least curly layer will curl a little. But the variation is always going to be there, and I prefer to think of it as a feature, not a bug.
Curly Girl "rules" I follow:
*No sulfates, which are the detergent ingredients in standard shampoos which strip the hair of needed moisture. Textured hair tends to be a lot thirstier than straight hair, though there's a lot of variation in how much moisture you need from one person to another. The exception to this rule, for me, is when I need to clarify my hair, to remove any buildup of product or oil –– I might do this once a month, and if I don't have a sulfate shampoo handy, I just use a cider-vinegar solution sprayed into my hair instead.
*No silicones, which usually occur in conditioners. Again, there are silicones and silicones, and some are more water-soluble than others. I know people with beautiful curly hair who use products with silicones. The general problem with silicones, however, is that, not being water-soluble, and removable only with the use of a sulfate shampoo, they will build up on hair to weigh it down, making it quickly brittle and lifeless and less amenable to springing up in its natural curl pattern.
*No dry brushing. Exceptions: right before I wash it, to detangle and remove loose hair, OR when I'm going to put it up in an updo and want it smooth, OR occasionally when I'm going to wear it down and want it smooth and straighter except at the ends, which will always curl up as long as they're layered.
Things I do that are not strictly the Curly Girl Method, but work for me:
*Use a wide-toothed comb to break curl clumps apart, because I like some volume, and it feels less tangly this way. I had not done this yet in the photo above, and if I can restrain myself, I might not do it before I go out. But usually I do do that.
*Use a shampoo, instead of just washing with conditioner. My scalp can't handle "co-washing." I do use a sulfate-free shampoo –- actually, at the moment I'm using a Shea Moisture anti-inflammation soap bar which isn't technically a shampoo, but has the same ingredients as your standard shampoo bar. This way I can go longer between hair washes. Right now I'm washing my hair once a week. If my scalp starts to itch or flake, then I do wash as soon as I have those symptoms, but lately I've been able to go this long without any scalp problems. That saves wear and tear on both my hair and my daily routine.
*Use heat to dry, especially in the winter. My hair takes forever to dry: it's very dense, heavy, and low-porosity, which means that although it takes a long time to get really wet (like a water dog's coat, I guess), once it is wet, it's WET, and it doesn't want to let go of that water. I have a cheap diffuser which I mostly use to "hover diffuse," which just means "dry the way you'd normally dry your hair with a dryer, but it doesn't blow all the curl out of your hair."
*Touch my hair when it's drying. I mean, I just don't care if curl clumps break apart, or I get a little frizz. I just do not care. I'm not about to let my hair get in the way of living my life, and I'm going to touch it if I want to. So there.
What I did today:
*washed with the SheaMoisture soap bar
*got my hands full of conditioner from my conditioner bar, and squished that through my hair while it was very wet
*added some Cantu curl cream, from a bottle which I have had for almost three years (you only need a little!) and have diluted with a lot of water. Squished that through with the conditioner, then rinsed. Technically you're supposed to leave a curl cream in, but my hair feels gunky if I do that.
*squeezed out excess water with a microfiber towel.
*bent over at the waist, combed out all my hair while I was upside down, and smoothed some Not Your Mother's Curl Talk foam through it, top and bottom, as if I were icing a cake. Then raked it through with my fingers, from roots to tip, to distribute the product, then scrunched the excess product and water out of my hair. Stood up, shook back my hair out of my face, and went about my day.
*When I got tired of having wet hair, I diffused it until it was almost dry. This was probably two hours ago. It's now MORE almost-dry than it was, though still not what I'd call bone-dry.
And that's it. It's an easy routine, and I'm happy with the results. I'm not a perfectionist about my hair –– all I really want is for it to be healthy and have some shape, and to look as though maybe I tried a little without my actually having to try any more than a little. The cut, mainly, ensures that I can wear it down and feel that I have a style, while still remaining long enough to put up if I need to. I do have better and worse hair days, but I don't have to have a bad hair day.
Also, one side is always curlier than the other, but this is because I side-part my hair, which means that one side gets more top-layer, while on the other side, the less-curly under-layers are more exposed. And so be it.
As you can see, my hair is fairly coarse. It's never going to be silky, satiny, smooth Breck-Girl mid-70s kind of hair. That's honestly okay, too. It is what it is, and I've learned to embrace it and see that it has its own beauty, which all the advertising of my youth simply failed to inscribe.
Anyway, on a day after a night of virtually no sleep, it's a lift to have clean, reasonably well-turned-out hair. Now to take myself off for a date with my husband. Happy weekend, all!