Hair! Haircare, Styling, all things hair.

While I think the best way to find a great stylist is to talk to people you see with hair like yours and good haircuts, I've used online searches a lot in my natural hair lifetime.

These worked for my area:

https://curlmaps.com/

https://readcurl.com/curlstylists/

There are also brand specific searches of course.

Deva curl is a curl by curl dry cut, good for all curl and wave types. Closest you can get to wash & go in my experience.

https://www.devacurl.com/finder

Ouidad is a haircut with hidden thinning, it was great for my hair but my stylist moved. Really good if your main issues are bulkiness and lack of definition.

https://www.ouidad.com/pages/salons?srsltid=AfmBOoqsunNt0N9izJV23pfHxC6AzOxsEhzkzyvLyrup70vrrf2Ls4MW

Rezo cuts are retro looking and let your hair fall forward like it always wants to, good for tighter curls.

https://rezoacademy.com/pages/store-locator-1

This came over my news feed. I think everyone is aware of hair changing at puberty but it changes over a lifetime too.

What do you do on wash day and between?

mine: wash day, Malibu C hard water shampoo, Innersense Hydrating conditioner, their Serenity Styling cream. Comb it through, flip head over and rake it through upside down. Scrunch, then scrunch with a soft microfiber towel. Wrap it in the same damp towel (between a plop and turbo twist arrangement) while doing skincare. Then let the hair down and gently clap some gel through, diffuse (sometimes hovering, sometimes scrunching, depends on how it's looking).

Refresh, everything except the shampoo.

Mini-refresh, sometimes I can smooth on some mousse or foam and the added definition is enough. Sometimes it looks good and I can hairspray. If it's stretched out those don't work though.

Do you find product choice more important, or styling technique? I feel like finding a good technique matters more in getting your hair shape (curly, wavy, straight) to look good and hold, and product choice relates to hair type - thick or thin, coarse or fine, porous or resistant.

For the look of my hair I will go with technique. If I couldn't have the products I love I think I could still get a pretty good result by leaving something in it and doing the rake, scrunch and diffuse, and that there is no product that would give me a good looking wash and go.

Please help! I live in the netherlands, where it's crazy humid, I have long, very very thin baby like hair, which frizzes like a tangle ball. It's FULL of tangles and even right after a shower & bruahing it tangles up and feels and looks frizzy.

I currently use the Jessy curl line for shampoo, panten volume for clarifying shampoo, conditioner and treatment deep conditioner, and jessy curl oil + Gel.

A few weeks ago I started using hair styling spray from John Frieda - frizz ease. I think it helps somewhat...

I even cut 2.6 inches off my hair and it didn't seem to help with the "damaged look".

My hair is completely natural, and I dont heat style, tho I started defusing a few weeks ago instead of air drying, which seems to have helped somewhat with the frizz...

I sleep on silk pillow cases, either in a loose bun (cause I can't pineapple anymore because my hair is too long) or In a silk bonnet.

I even dry my hair with a 100% cotton t shirt. I do it all!!

It shouldn't look so damaged and frizzy!!

When I sleep on soft rolls my hair looks better the next day, but very soon it starts tangling and getting frizzy again...

PLEASE! HELP ME!

Perhaps I need to go back to silicones? Right now I don't even care about the curls or nothing, I just want my hair to stop being so god damn frizzy.

Please help!!!

Products that I can use???

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16609017

Please recommend me a shampoo! I have 2b/2c wavy hair. I currently use tresemme flawless curls shampoo+conditioner 2x/week. I'm looking to start using a gentle shampoo more often now that it's summer and I'm working out 6 days a week.

US drugstore brands preferred but I wouldn't mind driving to a cosmetics store to stock up. :)

(I hope it's okay to post here - the hair communities I could find are all inactive.)

Why do I get hair clumps a lot that I need to tear out? I wash hair 2-4x/wk. Most often use Carols daughter wdd shampoo , wide tooth comb in shower, microfiber towel, and denman brush, but on occasion I use asiam conditioner or asiam gel. Reset wash monthly

##Overview I have not cut my hair since 2018. I went to a stylist maybe 3 years ago to get my hair thinned but otherwise it's been just growing freely for many years. I've never had hair like this prior to now and any advice on treatment for it so it can be healthier would be appreciated.

It's incredibly thick. When it's in a pony tail, at the base of my skull it is probably about 1"—1¼" diameter. I've never really been able to freely run my fingers or a straight comb through my hair, as it gets caught on random kinks or tangles along the way. I use a soft bristle wet hairbrush and it has been fantastic for controlling my hair.

I notice texturally my hair tends to have a somewhat paradoxical feeling of being dry and oily at the same time. Even after shampooing, if I feel my hair, the skin on my hand will seem to have a bit of oily buildup on it. But even so, you can see that my hair is often frizzy and the physical sensation as I touch it is of it being rather dry.

It often takes a bit of time to soak my hair when showering, maybe 3-4 minutes of running water. When wet, my hair sits at about my pec, and I've measured some follicles to be over 16" long, though when dry the hair bounces up significantly, barely touching my shoulders.

##Goals I would love my hair to not be so voluminous when dry. It is poofy, out of control. I just want it to sit down a little more so I can have it down without constantly battling it to not get in my face and mouth.

I want my hair to feel smoother. Is silky a goal? Who knows. I've gotten a lot of compliments on my hair over the years and I feel like it could be much better looking than it is now.

If kinkiness and tangles are an inevitable symptom of my hair type, so be it. Otherwise, I would really enjoy being able to run my hands through my hair without accidentally putting strands out in the process.

Thank you for your consideration and time!

I've seen Mell and others do this to speed drying (and her hair does always turn out lovely), but it seems like you'd be pulling out the product you just spent time carefully working into your hair. You could gently re-add product, but the whole time you are applying product you are supposed to keep wetting your hair to make sure the product works correctly, so it seems like you end up in a loop of wet hair-add product-hair too wet-dry hair but remove product-rewet hair to add product-hair too wet-ad nauseum. If it's okay to suck out some of the product to get your hair drier faster, doesn't that imply you shouldn't need that much product in the first place? Or that your hair doesn't need to be that wet to add it in the first place?

Hi everybody! It looks pretty dead in here from the age of the most recent posts, which makes me sad because this was such a healthy, useful community on Reddit (good riddance), so I'm guessing I won't get any responses. But hey, you gotta be the change you want to see, so here goes:

I'm talking about the type of hair dryer that has a diffuser built into it so it can only be used for diffusing, not any other type of hairdrying. They seem to just be called "diffusers" so it's hard to search for them, but I've seen one from BedHead, this very similar item from Revlon, and this different (more expensive, but from the looks of it possibly better designed?) style from Bellisima Italia.

Has anyone used one of these? How do they compare to the attachment types? I've currently got a refurb Shark, which I'm pretty happy with, but it's big (hard to pack/store) and heavy and occasionally I manage to knock the diffuser off the end even with the magnets, because I am horribly clumsy. I never use a dryer without a diffuser, so I thought "Hey, why don't they make just a diffusing device? It would be lighter and smaller and no more struggling with keeping the diffuser on the nozzle!" And it turns out they do but I've never seen anyone talk about them so I figure there must be some hidden problem, right?

Routine:

• As I Am Dry & Itchy shampoo and conditioner
• Scrunch in LA Looks Extreme Sport Gel on wet hair, a dollop for front and back
• Scrunch dry with microfiber towel
• Diffuse with low heat, then cool, until about 70% dry or I'm bored
• Air dry, then scrunch out the crunch

Edited

Hello im new to the CG method, i wanted to ask questions to the community but since we cant create more posts in the reddit well i will try there.

So basically i tried the whole curly girl method but at the end when i “break the hardness” of the hair when the gel is dried my hair cause a lot of flakes, and also how to avoid frizziness ? my hair deal with it a lot and its so annoying, i think gel might work but rn it cause a lot of flakes. thank you in advance for your help

PS : the type of hair im trying to achieve is the messy fringe haircut for males picture :

Also if there is a easier way to discuss with the community such as a discord or something please send me the invite thank you

Hello fellow curly-haired people!

I just wanted to recommend the linked detangler brush. I use this one in the shower on wet hair and it has been a game-changer-- way less pulling and breakage and hair loss in general. I was using a wide-tooth comb before I came across this brush, but it's soooo much nicer and I don't spend 30 minutes picking through my hair now. If you haven't tried one of these brushes, it's totally worth the $5!

Lots of people say you have to use sulfate-free shampoo to avoid damaging or stripping your hair. There also people who say you have to use shampoo with sulfates to get your hair clean.

They are both wrong.

Academic hair science is a mess. Hair is very diverse. Different hair reacts differently to ingredients. Ingredients work similarly on skin but with hair, ingredients work differently.

If 100 people use glycerin on their skin, you might have 60 people’s skin get more hydrated and improve, 20 people’s skin stays around the same, the final 20 might get worse for some reason – like the glycerin helped some other ingredient penetrate and their skin got irritated, or they have an allergy. There’s still complexity, but you wouldn’t have half the people’s skin dry out more. But that’s kind of how it is with hair.

Variation in curl pattern can also affect how ingredients work.

When it comes to wet vs dry detangling, water makes hair weaker inside and cuticles raise so you should detangle when dry. At least on straight hair. But on curly hair, hair sticks less to each other (like spiral pasta vs spaghetti pasta) and the weakening bonds makes it less damaging and results in less breakage. But even then, we still don't know everything (which is better for wavy hair, what if you use a brush or comb, what if you bleach your hair, what if your hair is longer, etc.). There's a lot of variables.

Hair science is really sparse. You can't generalize hair. Even things like humidity can change the results. The structure of hair as we know it is still evolving and there isn't a lot of consistency in terminology.

For example, around the late 90s, some hair scientists decided that half the protein in hair wouldn’t be called keratin anymore. But not everyone follows this. You’ll see things like “hair is 80% keratin by mass” in a paper from 2017. It’s clear they’re using the old definition – but if a paper says “we concluded that this ingredient works on keratin in hair”, what do they mean by “keratin?"

Hair products aren't about individual ingredients, it is about the overall formulation. Sulfates usually refers to sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate, which are surfactants. Surfactants help break up oil and mingle with water so you can rinse it. Sulfates have sulfate heads, the tails are similar to other surfactants.

These 4 diagrams show 4 different ways that shampoos clean at a microscopic level – each diagram goes from left to right. The pink tadpoles are the surfactants.

You can see that the surfactants are working together to clean the hair. This is called a supramolecular process, where molecules are interacting without going through a chemical reaction.

And all 4 of these are probably happening on your hair at the same time, to different extents – there’s probably more mechanisms still to be discovered.

How much of each one is happening depends on the formula of the shampoo and what type of stuff you are cleaning off.

If you look at the ingredients, you'll have 3 or more surfactants. If you change the ratio of the ingredients or swap one of these surfactants with something else, the shampoo will work differently. Plus there's other ingredients like polymers to take into account. The texture of the shampoo and opening of the bottle changes how it disperses and spreads as well.

Even just checking the pH of a product isn't the whole picture when it is so complex.

Cosmetic formulators spend a lot of time just doing trial and error, making formulas and trying them out. Changing little things about the formula causes big changes.

Good Housekeeping did a test with 10 shampoo and conditioner pairings. Some had sulfates and some didn’t. The set that stripped hair dye the least had sulfates – it was Tresemme’s Keratin Smooth Color set.

Formulators know that people who go for sulfate free want a gentler shampoo so that's what they aim for when making the formulation. They know there’s all these widespread myths about sulfates being harsh – they’ve been around since the 90s. Adding sulfates doesn't mean it will strip more. There’s a good chance that if you grab a random shampoo with sulfates, and a random shampoo without sulfates, the one with sulfates will clean better because of product design and that's how they were formulated. It’s not because just adding sulfates automatically makes shampoos strip more. They might have also added other ingredients to make the hair feel cleaner.

How well it foams doesn't tell you how well it cleans. How well something foams depends on how a formula interacts with air and water to stabilise a thin stretched out film of water. Cleaning is about how it interacts with oil and dirt. But if something doesn’t foam when we use it, we tend to feel it isn’t cleaning well. It’s just a psychological thing.

How well a shampoo cleans is complicated. Bottom line: Sulfate-free and sulfate-containing don’t really mean much. How well a shampoo cleans is too complicated to predict that easily.

It’s much more useful to look at what the shampoo is telling you. If it says “clarifying” it’s a shampoo designed to clean your hair better, if it says “colour protection”, it can have sulfates and still strip dye less. It’s also really useful to look at reviews from people with similar hair to you and try a sample before buying.

So sometimes my hair looks about how I want it, and I don't really want to disrupt it by scrunching. In this example I was happy with the crunchy result in terms of shape but IRL it did look kinda stringy. So instead of flipping and squishing it to break the cast, or leaving it alone to naturally soften, praying hands smoothed down the hair and rub at the roots released just enough of the stiffness without inducing more disorder than I was ready for.

Just a general tip - even though the phrase is "scrunch out the crunch" you can twist out the crunch or smooth out the crunch to leave the ends more defined and a calmer look.

(ETA: also shows that wavy hair can 'curl' from the root - that was one of the bizarre claims I saw on r/curlyhair, that curls always start at roots and waves always have straight roots. This person was classifying someone I'd have called at 3b as wavy because her curls started partway down the hair. Discussion got oddly heated. Root curl is independent of curl shape for sure.)

The enormous ponytail! I noticed it in a zoom call for work, it was a big round puff in the camera but when I got a better view it's just waves on waves.

My hair is fine, 2b/c, High porosity hair. It doesn’t curl for the first couple inches, but idk if that’s because of genetics or something I’m doing wrong. Either way, I have symptoms of not having enough of either protein or moisture. It’s dry and frizzy, and sometimes feels like hay, but also breaks easily and is stringy when it’s wet. All I do is shampoo and condition with shea moistures light blue hydrate and repair. I scrunch it damp and then diffuse on cool for a little but not fully dry. I need ideas for products, and I’m open for deep conditioners or hair masks or something, but I like to get out the door and try not to spend long styling it.

A few months ago I posted about the benefits of peptides in hair products.

The unfortunate of that post was that the peptides studied in the research I cited where all ‘custom-made’ and hard to find in a product. But the papers that I cited regarding the impressive results of peptides all had prof. Artur Cavaco-Paulo as the research leader.

Now I came across the K18 peptide repair crème, and guess who is one of the inventors? Prof. Artur Cavaco-Paulo!

☝️To understand this product we first need to discuss standard conditioning and protein products.

Hair mainly consists of protein, in particular keratin. Heat styling, bleaching etc. damage the keratin. Hair is dead and can’t repair the damaged keratin.

Conditioning agents attach to the outer layer of the hair and smoothen the surface but the inner keratin layers responsible for the strength of the hair are not repaired. Besides, they temporarily attach to the surface and are removed by the next wash

Most proteins works like standard conditioning agents. These proteins temporarily attach to the outer layer. Only low molecular weight peptides (hydrolysed proteins) and amino acids can diffuse into the hair cortex and may interact with the damaged keratin.

☝️Read well the word MAY because this is exactly what the K18 product is changing to will!

The hair keratin (protein) is made out of strings of amino acids (amino acids are the body’s basic building blocks). But the order of those amino acids is very specific and if you want a peptide (also chains of amino acids but smaller chains than protein) to bind to this specific order you need to unravel the sequence of the hair keratin and design the ‘perfect’ peptide to bind to it.

And this is what the inventors of the K18 peptide did, they spent many years to find and design the unique combination which has the highest affinity and interaction with the hair keratin and the ability to restrengthen the hair (from the inside, swipe right).

☝️If you have non damaged hair you will see less results with this product, but slightly damaged? Try it 🤗

❓Have you already tried @k18hair ?

Taken from:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CO0TKxGHB0G

Hello curly gurls. After a decade of straightening my hair, I am embracing my natural hair texture and returning to the curly life. A lot of things are very new for me.

My question is, how do you put up your hair for things like the gym? I usually brush it (!) into a bun. This will obviously break up the curls and ruin them. But my hair is too heavy and hot to work out without putting it up. What do?

Where do you find more resources about curly hair?

Are there any youtube channels or blogs to learn more about taking care of it? A book maybe?

What is your summer routine, products and process?

I have thick coarse loosely but stubbornly curly hair (around 2c), mostly low porosity and having good success with:

Malibu C hard water shampoo

Innersense Hydrating Cream Conditioner (raked through in sections working up from nape, mostly left in, just a gentle rinse of the roots)

Jessicurl confident coils & Davines serum raked into sections, very wet hair (4 sections, each gets one pump of the lotion and one drop of the serum, mixed)

Squelch squelch scrunch then blot with a cloth. Sometimes wrap it in a plop arrangement, trying not to stretch it out.

Then Ouidad Climate Control Extreme gel. Patted through the length, and scrunched into the ends. Then if I have time, air dry an hour before diffusing. If I don't have time, hair dryer on high without diffuser for 5 minutes trying not to let it move around too much, then a quick scrunch with the diffuser on. It doesn't get all the way dry but any time with hair dryer cuts overall dry time by hours.

Due to my skin condition, if I go too long without using H&S my scalp health really starts to really suffer. I don't find H&S to be as harsh as people say but I wonder if there's a better shampoo out there with the same active ingredient (zinc pyrithione). Does anyone else here suffer with eczema, dermatitis, psoriasis, or other skin conditions linked to inflammation on the scalp? What do you use to balance scalp health and maintain beautiful curls?

thanks ahead of time!