A wavy hair blog sharing tips and tricks for embracing naturally wavy hair.
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These are all samples of a type of question I’ve received that in my mind, ultimately boil down to “How can I embrace my wavy hair with less effort or less time?”
Let me add the disclaimer that I am not saying that opting for a lower maintenance or less time-consuming routine means you are being lazy. I used that in the title because it’s a way that people commonly describe easier hair routines, and I thought it would help people find this post. There are endless reasons why you may choose to go for a routine that is simpler or faster, ad there is no shame in any of those reasons in my opinion. Nobody should feel obligated to spend a lot of time on their hair in my opinion!
Anyway, back to the topic of so-called lazy wavy hair routines. I didn’t feel great about my answer to people who were asking me for quicker or easier hair routines until recently.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been trying to find a routine that took less of my time, but gave me results I was comfortable with. I’ve found a routine that I’m shockingly happy with. I started out trying to find a routine that might be “acceptable” for people who needed or wanted an easier route, but I expected to have to sacrifice the tightness of my wavy curls quite a bit.
In the past I had tried to compare air drying and diffusing, and my air drying results were never satisfying to me. I’ve always felt like I pretty much have to diffuse my hair to near-dry to get results I was happy with. That isn’t the case, though!
I’ve had people ask me if they have to shower in the morning if they want to follow the curly girl method or otherwise embrace their natural waves or curls. Nope! You can shower at night. It does take some additional planning, though.
I have always preferred to shower at night (I am not a fan of waking up earlier to shower and do my hair!) so I can share how I make it work! Well, this is what I do on ‘regular’ wash days anyway. Sometimes when I’m doing blog posts for this blog I will do my hair differently for the sake of a blog post.
I recently did a blog post about the curly girl method transition phase where I explained what it was, and answered some other related questions. A common question that I didn’t answer in that post is basically ‘how can I survive the transition phase?”. I thought that question was big enough to warrant its own post.
This is the biggest one, in my opinion. What makes the transition phase so challenging for many people is they decide they absolutely can’t wash their hair more than once every three days or four days or whatever timeframe. I do believe that it’s good to work on getting your hair used to being washed less frequently because daily shampooing can be drying. I don’t believe that the only way to “train” your hair to produce less oils is to go from daily washing to once-a-week washing.
Prior to trying the curly girl method I had been a daily washer, so I started by just moving to every other day at first. That was tolerable, 3+ days would not have been tolerable for me. I would have been insecure about how my hair looked, and felt. It wasn’t worth it to me!
Plus, if I just really messed up a wash day? I’d sometimes get right back in the shower and rewash just an hour after I washed the first time. I wasn’t willing to hate my hair the entire time between wash days, and one “extra” shampoo experience isn’t going to leave your hair super dry or otherwise cause major problems. If you’re itching to wash your hair – just wash it, you’ll be happier and your hair will be okay.