My hair was curly when I was a toddler! How can I get my curls back?
I see questions similar to this posed in wavy/curly hair groups all the time. I recently saw a post from a curly hair stylist who said she hears it from her clients all the time, too. I thought it was worthy of a blog post so, here we go!
If I had curly hair as a kid shouldn’t my hair be curly or at least wavy now?
Your curl pattern from childhood is not necessarily the same curl pattern that you should have as an adult. Our early childhood curl pattern is not our ‘true’ pattern for our whole lives, at least not necessarily. Likely if your hair was curly as a baby, it is at least mildly wavy now.
Some people have straight hair as a child, but their hair gets wavy or curly as they get older. Others have wavy or curly hair as a child that gets straighter.
I don’t want people to start the curly girl method or wavy girl method expecting their results to match their childhood photos, because odds are, it won’t.
However, if your hair was curly as a child, it likely isn’t pin-straight. It likely is at least somewhat wavy. My own hair wasn’t curly when I was a baby. It got “poofy” when I was about six, and even poofier when I was about 12. Then around 24 it got super frizzy.
In hindsight, I know that the reason my hair was poofy at 6, and really poofy at 12, was because my hair was getting wavier or less straight. However, it didn’t look obviously wavy because I was brushing my waves out into poof. I didn’t know how to care for my wavy hair.
