A wavy hair blog sharing tips and tricks for embracing naturally wavy hair.
I got a couple of comments and emails this week that have made me realize I need to cover some more naturally wavy hair care basics on here! Please continue to leave me comments or messages with any questions that you may have and I’ll keep trying to produce content to help you out.
Recently I covered how to plop your wavy hair. While it’s talked about slightly less often, I personally am also a fan of microplopping. I thought I’d do a guide for how to microplop your hair as well!
Microplopping is when you scrunch your hair using a t-shirt, to help enhance and dry your naturally wavy or curly hair. Microplopping can help remove excess water to avoid weigh down, or it can be used to help waves spring back up after applying products.
The purpose of microplopping is to remove excess water from your hair to prevent water from flattening your hair pattern. Microplopping can help your hair stay in a tighter curl pattern while your hair dries, can help your waves to spring back up if they stretch out after adding products.
Personally, I use microplopping to correct my hair if it starts to fall before it dries. For example, if I plop, add my mousse, and then see that the top of my strands is going straight, I will microplop to help add wave back high up on my strands.
Or, if I am diffusing the left side of my head first, and see that the right side of my head has become elongated, I will microplop that side before diffusing it to help it spring back up before I diffuse it. Your hair will stay in the pattern that it dries in, so it’s important to have it in the pattern you want before diffusing.
I almost always “damp style” my wavy hair. I didn’t start out doing that, though. When I first discovered the curly girl method, I used wet styling for several months. I didn’t know I was ‘wet styling’ I just thought that was how everyone did it and that it was just the normal way to style wavy or curly hair.
I actually tried damp styling on a whim of my own, I wasn’t aware that it was even a styling choice when I did it. It gave me results I liked better though, so I stuck with it.
Then later, I came to find out that lots of other people did the same thing. When I first found a wavy community, I noticed that a LOT of wavy-haired people did it. I also learned that there was a term for it – damp styling!
Wet styling is when you apply styling products to wet hair. For example, adding a leave-in conditioner, curl cream and a gel to hair while still in the shower or immediately after stepping out of the shower.
Damp styling is when you apply styling products to your hair after it is partially dry. One day to damp style would be to shower, then wrap your hair in a microfiber towel for 15 minutes before adding gel.
The straight hair spectrum includes hair that has a slight bend to it, so if your hair isn’t “perfectly straight” is still may qualify as straight. Or you may have naturally wavy hair that is being brushed out so it doesn’t look how you typically expect wavy hair to look, despite being naturally wavy.
You may think of “truly straight” hair as being perfectly straight. Yet, hair that has a slight bend to it is still considered straight. The difference between straight hair and wavy hair, is wavy hair goes back and forth in both directions, left and right. Straight hair can twist ta bit to one side, but won’t go back and forth.
Sometimes people think they don’t have straight or wavy hair because they don’t really recognize what naturally wavy hair really looks like! It sounds silly, but it really is true. Prior to a few years ago, if I saw someone with naturally wavy hair that was well defined, I would have said they had curly hair.
I thought wavy hair was very rare, and I thought it was when hair looked more like straight hair in that it would largely be one big group of hair, but that sort of “waved” in and out…like the results you get from a barrel hair crimper or “hair waver” tool.
Those tools don’t make results that look very similar to naturally wavy hair. Basically, my idea of ‘wavy hair’ was based on artificial wavy hair, and I didn’t realize it. I didn’t know that wavy hair could have individual waves, like the photo below.
