How Much Gel To Use On Wavy Hair

A really common question I get from people who are relatively new to the curly girl method or embracing their wavy hair, is how much gel should I use? Also, how to tell if you’re using too much gel or not enough!

It’s a really great question to be asking, and it has a little bit of a complex answer. I recently did my hair with too much gel, and then again with not enough gel, so that I could show you through images what each of those look like.

How much hair humans have REALLY varies

First though, I wanted to give a visual for why it is so challenging to know how much gel to use on wavy hair. It’s because how much hair you have on your head can be VASTLY different from how much hair another person has on their head, even if their hair is the same length as yours and even if neither of you are experiencing hair thinning or baldness at all. I’ve read that people with dense hair can have 6x as many hairs on their head as someone with low-density hair. That sounds a little hard to believe, but the tiktok embedded below helps illustrate this fact.

@ciera.hamilton No wonder people always confuse us for twins 🥰 #braid #twins #fyp #foryoupage #thickhair ♬ Ice Age – B

Their hair is roughly the same length, but from the size of their braids, you can see that the first girl has easily more than 3x as much hair as the second girl, as the sections of her braid (so 1/3 portions of her hair) are thicker than the other girl’s entire braid. As a result, if both of these people wanted to use “enough” gel, the first girl would need to use more than twice as much gel as the second girl.

Some people recommend measuring your ponytail thickness and estimating gel based on that. I have tried those before and have never found them to get it quite right. Personally, I think the only way to figure out how much gel you need is to experiment a bit, and to look for signs that you used too much, or not enough, and adjust in the future until you find the perfect amount for you.

How To Tell If You’ve Used Too Much Hair Gel

There are many signs that can show up if you’ve used too much gel. Those include:

• Your cast is really hard and difficult to get rid of
• Your hair feels sticky or very producty even after you’ve scrunched out the cast
• Your hair is weighed down or heavy
• You have flakes or chunks of dried gel in your hair or that show up in the air when you break your gel cast
• Your hair feels dirty, gritty or just…yucky.
• Your hair looks like it has elmers glue in it
• Your scalp is sticky

Here are some photos of what my hair looked like when I used too much gel:

How To Tell If You Haven’t Used Enough Hair Gel

Some people prefer to style their hair quite loosely, perhaps they’re aiming for beachy waves or just want the softest hair possible. A  majority of my blog followers are looking to get a lot of curl definition and to get results that are more tightly wavy. The following signs of ‘not using enough gel’ are based on the assumption that you want tight results.

• You didn’t get a firm cast
• You didn’t get an even cast over all sides of all of your curl clumps
• Some (or all) of your curl clumps didn’t stay nicely clumped but your hair started to separate before you scrunched out the crunch
• Your hair stayed very soft and fluffy, almost like you didn’t use hair gel
• Your cast was so soft that as soon as you touched your hair it broke.

Here is what my hair looked like before scrunching out the crunch, when I did not use enough gel. My hair should not have been in individual strands like this, they should have been in curl clumps.

Tips For Getting Even Gel Distribution

Consider your hair gel application technique. Sometimes results that seem like not enough gel are actually a problem of gel distribution. Some methods for adding gel to your hair (such as scrunching) will often result in gel not getting evenly dispersed across all of your hair. I go into this in depth in my article 6 methods for hair product application compared.

Try applying your gel in sections to make sure you’re getting enough in each portion of your head.

Factors that impact how much hair gel you’ll need:

• Your hair density
• Your hair strand thickness
• The length of your hair
• The current humidity levels
• The specific gel you’re using
• How wet your hair was when you applied your gel