A wavy hair blog sharing tips and tricks for embracing naturally wavy hair.
Your naturally wavy hair used to feel light and bouncy. Or maybe it didn’t really feel any particular way that you noticed. Now, you’re conscious of it feeling heavy. If you’re wondering why, that’s what this post is all about!
When wavy hair feels heavy it’s because it has become weighed down. This is likely the result of using products too heavy in oils, and/or product build up on the scalp.
Something I come across in wavy/curly groups fairly often is a comment similar to this one.
“I tried the curly girl method in the past and it just does not work for my hair. What does that mean? Does my hair need silicones?”
Some people conclude that their hair does need silicones. I am not someone who believes that silicones are the devil, personally. At the same time, it doesn’t make sense to me that anyone’s hair could need silicones.
Silicones are emollients, and emollients are ingredients in products that help create a protective barrier or film on the hair. This helps seal your hair. On their own, emollients are not moisturizing. However, if you use moisturizing products and then also use an emollient, the emollient helps your hair stay moisturized by sealing the moisturizing ingredients into your hair.
Silicones are “manmade” emollients, but there are many other types, too. For example, fatty alcohols are emollients, as are some oils and butters, proteins and hydrolyzed proteins and more.
Dimethicone is often listed as the “worst” silicone, and it is an emollient, but shea butter and argan oil are two examples of emollients that are not seen as “bad” by those who follow the curly girl method, basically just because they’re more natural. The function is the same, though. That’s not to say that all emollients work exactly the same, as they do vary some. So…
This was my wet hair when I was about 14. My whole life, my hair has been wavy when wet but straight once dry. Somehow, it never occurred to me to think twice about it! My hair was straight when it dried, so it was straight..or so I thought for the first 26 years of my life. It turned out, I have naturally wavy hair and just never knew it.
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Earlier this year I was struggling with getting my waves to last very long. (Ps – my post how to make wavy hair last longer focuses on that topic). In the past, I would get 3 days out of a wash day. At first, day 3 just looked rough. Then day 2 wasn’t looking good, and day 3 was almost straight.
When I realized that my favorite mousse had been reformulated, at first I thought that must be to blame. So I bought a new mousse, and it didn’t’ give me any hold. So I bought another mousse – again, no hold. I started to worry that I’d have to go back to gel.
Why do all of these mousses not have any hold for me even though all these other people online say they get a hard hold from these same products?
This is what day 2 or day 3 usually looks like for me. For a while this is what it would look like immediately after scrunching out the crunch! Fewer waves, way less definition, and it would collapse to almost-straight quite quickly.
When I went back to my old mousse and got no cast at all, I started getting suspicious. While I didn’t get long-lasting waves the week or two prior, I did at least get a cast. Now I wasn’t getting a cast at all, and this was the same bottle of mousse. It couldn’t be the product – it had to be my hair. But how or why?
I was almost 2 years into the curly girl method. Why would my hair suddenly change now? I was confused.