Early on when attempting the curly girl method, I felt like scrunching my hair much at all would make my hair more frizzy, and would break up my curl clumps quite a bit.
At the same time, I did recognize that scrunching my hair right at the end of my shower helped my hair to separate from one big blob into clumps. I also recognized that if I walked around after my shower for quite a while, my roots would start to fall flat, and that scrunching again could help revive some waves to the top of my strands.
For about 2.5 years, my goal was to scrunch enough to form clumps but not so much as to cause my clumps to break up or get frizz.
I would just scrunch a couple of times at the very end of my shower, scrunch each section of my hair once after applying my mousse, and then if my roots were really falling flat before I was done diffusing, I’d sometimes scrunch with a shirt (aka microplop – click for my microplopping tutorial) an additional time to avoid those flat/straight roots.
I still don’t think that was a bad technique. It worked. I’ve learned a few things, and realized a couple things about my own hair, in the last couple of months that have changed my technique. I now scrunch a lot more than I used to. I’ll get to why later.
I did one wash day where I did a little scrunching, and one wash day where I did a lot of scrunching, so I could compare for you all. Let me get a bit more into the details first though!