by Rachelle
“You don’t wash your hair?” my friend asked me with an incredulous look and gaping mouth.
“I wash my hair, just not with shampoo,” I said with a smile.
This is the customary reaction I get when describing my hair care routine.
It’s understandable. It is a revolutionary concept, after all, this curly girl routine I adopted several years ago.
I never liked my curly hair. As a little girl, I longed to possess the long, straight hair of the storybook princesses. Alas, I was stuck with my mother’s extremely thick hair and my father’s unruly curls. Thickness and curls proved to be an impossible combination. For most of my childhood, I shampooed, brushed-out, and pony-tailed my curls. But my stubborn mane refused to transform into the silky beauty of which I dreamed. In fact, my hair continued to drive me to tears by frizzing uncontrollably.
The first step on my journey to learning to care for my curls correctly was to stumble upon Got Curl. As I read with wide eyes about the curly care routine and poured over the success stories of curly girls who had gone before, I was shocked at what I learned.
Shampoo, made up of harsh ingredients (such as sodium laurel sulfate, ammonium laureth sulfate, and sodium laureth sulfate) dries out curls, stripping them of the natural oils they require in order to be beautiful. Vigorously washing with shampoo as I was doing was causing the very frizz I hated so much!
I realized that I was very, very wrong about my curls. I had always thought they were out to ruin every dream of beauty I had. But it turned out that shampoo was the enemy! To think, all of those years I had been trying to care for my hair, I had been stripping it of the life-giving (and frizz-preventing) oils it so desperately needed by washing it with shampoo! My curls were the victim, not the villain!
Ready to try anything to release the beautiful locks I was now confident I had, I decided to try the curly girl method. I bought the book Curly Girl, and for three weeks I tried this radical hair care routine. I declared the shampoo bottle off-limits and used conditioner to wash my hair. I avoided the hairdryer and opted to allow my curls to air-dry. I tossed my hairbrush.
After those three weeks, I was amazed at how curly my hair had become. To my delight, not only was it curlier, it felt cleaner and softer.
And frizz?
What frizz?!
To my delight, with the curly-girl method, I found that I possessed lovely curly hair hidden beneath what had formerly been a mass of thick frizz. I vowed never to subject my hair to shampoo again. I have been a curly girl for six years now and I firmly believe that all that curls need to be beautiful is the permanent banishment of the shampoo bottle and a little TLC.
The Curly Hair Care Foundation
- Forget the shampoo
- Forsake the hairbrush
- Forbid the use of the blow-dryer
- Form a close relationship with conditioner
My Curly Hair Regimen
- When I first step under the shower, I allow the water to rinse my curls.
- I gently distribute a generous amount of conditioner through my curls. I let my curls soak in the conditioner for about five minutes, then I lightly rinse with cold water (which lowers the frizz factor) for 10-15 seconds, leaving a bit of conditioner in my hair.
- I “scrunch-dry” with a towel.
- After I step out of the shower, I use approximately a tablespoon of conditioner or a leave-in product and finger-comb it through my hair to separate my curls.
- I then squirt some mousse into my palm and thoroughly scrunch my curls (scrunching the top layer last).
- I try to avoid touching my hair while it dries!
- I shake my fully-dry curls to give them more volume, then go about my day with my curls healthy and happy!
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