The View From My Fishbowl

I’m trying the curly girl routine. Again. I tried to go with the curly girl routine a few years ago, and it went well for a while, and then my hair abandoned all sense of curl for several months.

So, some explanations. First, following will probably be a series of girly posts, so I don’t blame the guys if they just skip them all. Still with me? Ok, go here to see a detailed guide of the curly girl method. To sum it up in a nutshell: basically, you don’t use shampoo with any sulfates, or you use no shampoo at all. You are letting your hair go ‘natural’ by cleaning it with conditioner only, allowing the natural oils to reach all the way to the end of your hair, instead of being whisked away daily by drying shampoos. This allows the natural curl to actually happen!

I’ve not always been without curly hair. Well, actually, I was bald until I was two years old. This is me as a baby:

Haha, my brothers will probably kill me for putting these pictures up. Weren’t they so cute?

When my hair finally started to grow at about age 2, it came in as unruly fine curls. Here I am at age 3, with my family for our first service at LVBC:

My brothers were goofballs. ROFL…ok, I’m back now.

As I got older and my hair got longer, it was too heavy and pulled the curl down. My mother painstakingly put sponge rollers in my hair every Saturday night for YEARS to give me ringlets every Sunday. They had no problem taking, because of the natural curl under everything, so the curls would often last halfway through the week or until I washed my hair again.

Fastforward to my high school years, when I actually began to do something with my own hair. I fell into the routine of washing, blowdrying, and using a curling iron for the ends. If I just left it or just blowdried it, it would become an unmanageable mane of frizz. The curling iron helped everything flow in the same direction, but I was really just helping the natural curl along.

I tried gelling my curls a few times, but my dad doesn’t like the ‘crunchy’ look, and the only thing I knew to do was to slap handfuls of gel onto my hair and scrunch it up. Not exactly the look I was going for. It looked greasy and wet, even two days after I did it!

So I just stuck with what I knew, and didn’t worry about the curls. I made peace with them. I tried the curly girl method once, but something distracted me partway through (can’t remember now what) and I fell back into the old routine. I spent a couple winters in hot, humid climates, where there was NOTHING that could convince me to wear my hair down. I got a haircut that basically stripped all the curl out of my hair for almost a year. But now it’s grown out, I’ve got a better cut, and I’m ready to try again!

Now, there are some things that I already do like a curly girl. One would be using sulfate-free shampoos. Sulfate (ammonium laureth sulfate, ammonium lauryl sulfate, sodium laureth sulfate, sodium lauryl sulfate, etc) cuts grease, which may make your hair feel clean, but is stripping your hair of all the good oils that it produces. Your hair is dead, dead, dead. The only way to make it look good is to keep it well-moisturized, which your scalp tries to do by producing natural oils, but most shampoos just cut all those oils away, making your head produce more oil than it normally would (then you get greasy hair). It’s a vicious cycle. I do wash my hair everyday during the summer, because it is so hot and I get sweaty. But I only use shampoo every second or third day, and just use conditioner on the other days.

Also, I don’t use brushes on my hair. I have a wide-toothed comb, but even that I use very rarely. I usually just use my fingers to comb through. I’ve been doing this for about two years now, and you wouldn’t believe the difference it has made! My hair breaks very easily, and I used to have all sorts of problems with split-ends and shorter ‘fly-aways.’ Between not using a brush and letting the natural oils stay on my hair, it is so much healthier now!

So basically the only part of the curly girl method I haven’t been following is to allow my hair to air dry. My mornings are usually a bit rushed, and I just blow dry straight, pull it back or curl the ends. This lasts me for all day, and has worked well for me. Although this isn’t the best picture to show my hair, this is generally what it looks like:

I’ve determined to try the curly girl method and see if it is easier to work with. If at the end of a couple weeks I decide it isn’t worth it, I will just go back to my former regimen. I’m on Day 3. Since this is my journal of releasing the inner curly girl (or at least attempting to), let me fill you in on the past few days.

Day One:

Sunday I shampooed my hair with my Avalon Organics shampoo. I’ve been using this shampoo for several months, and I love it! There is no sulfate, as I have mentioned already. I didn’t have time to do the curly routine, so I ended up blowdrying my hair and wearing it straight for Sunday. So Monday was really Day One. Monday I ‘washed’ my hair with conditioner, no shampoo. After getting out of the shower, I towel-dried it a little and ran my fingers through instead of using a comb. I scrunched it with plain aloe vera gel and let it mostly air-dry, helping it along a little with a diffuser. My hair was too crunchy for my liking, and yet was still frizzy. I found out later this was because I was scrunching it with a towel. Turns out it is better to scrunch with an old t-shirt or microfiber towel to minimize the frizz.

Monday afternoon, I read the article that I linked to above, and learned about ‘plopping‘ so I used a spray bottle to wet my hair, and tried ‘plopping’ before going to class that night. It seemed to work very well! I didn’t need to add any more gel since I put so much in the AM!

Day Two:

No shampoo, just conditioner again. This time I tried ‘plopping’ again, but it didn’t seem to work as well as the night before. I think because my hair was all wet from the shower. I used more hairspray (an all-natural, chemical-free) than the previous day, but that just made my hair crusty.

By the evening, I ended up pulling my hair into a ponytail. I didn’t have time to ‘plop’ it, and it was feeling pretty gross from all the gels and hairspray.

Day Three:

This brings us to today! This morning I shampooed with my sulfate-free shampoo, to try to get rid of all the products. Granted, I don’t use as many products on my hair as some do, but I’m pretty much a products-free kinda gal! So I did shampoo today, and then let the conditioner soak in very well. I used about 2 tsp of aloe gel, and just put it on the ends of my hair. I let it mostly air-dry, but since it takes so long, I ended up using the diffuser a little bit to speed things up.

So today I’m (mostly) products-free, and this is what my hair looks like:

So I’m not sure if I’m completely sold on it yet, because I certainly don’t want to stick with just this! We’ll see how it goes! I figure I should try it out for at least a couple weeks before I make a decision. There are some other things I can try and figure out what works for me.

Curly girls, what products do you use? What do you find most helpful? I’m on the prowl for suggestions and open to anything!