“I think my hair is wavy…but only sometimes? Why is that?”
This is a common question I’ve seen on wavy and curly hair groups. I thought it was worthy of its own blog post!
It’s natural for hair curl pattern to change based on the environment and how it’s treated day to day. This is true for all different types of hair. People who have hair that have looser hair patterns find that their hair looks and acts straight sometimes, and wavy other times. This can be really confusing, and makes people question what their ‘true’ hair type is.
I have a blog post that shares how to test if your hair is wavy, which you may find helpful if your goal is to help your hair look wavy all the time. I also have a blog post sharing a wavy hair curl pattern chart, which is often of interest to newbies, too. Anyway, this post is about discussing why your hair is straight sometimes and wavy other times.
Why Your Hair Is Only Wavy Sometimes
Humidity! It’s common for hair to curl up tighter when it is more humid. If your hair is on the borderline between straight and wavy, humidity can make it wavy, while on days where the air is more dry, it will act straighter. The curly girl handbook references how “Swavy” (straight-wavy) hair may be straight in the winter but wavy in the summer.
Of course, weather conditions fluctuate all the time so you can also see changes day to day in response to humidity levels changing. Or, you may have noticed that your hair gets curlier or straighter when you travel. If you go to Florida and your hair gets curlier there, that’s likely in response to the humidity.
Moisture. It’s common for people to find that their hair gets curlier after they get caught in the rain, or after they work out or get sweaty. For many people, their hair curls up better when it’s well-moisturized. Sweat or rain help moisturize hair, so this can make it curl up after your hair gets wet.
It’s especially common for people to notice that their hair curls up around their temples or around their neckline after they get sweaty.
My hair when it’s brushed.
Brushing or not. Those of us with naturally wavy hair who are trying to embrace our waves, typically don’t brush our hair except in the shower. We generally don’t brush our hair after washing it or after it has dried, because that pulls our waves straighter, and can also break up our curl clumps (though some people do brush a tiny bit if they are trying to achieve beachy waves).
If you sometimes brush your hair after the shower, and sometimes skip brushing it, this has the potential to make your hair wavy sometimes (when you don’t brush) and straighter sometimes (when you do brush it). Related article of mine: Why you shouldn’t brush wavy hair.
How long your hair stays wet. This is a bit of an odd one. Some people find that if they sleep on wet hair, when they wake up their hair is wavy, while if they let their hair dry before bed, it’ll be straight.
My sister has told me that this is how her hair works. The longer her hair stays wet, the more it will curl up. This is similar to the moisture point mentioned above. For some, their hair staying moisturized longer makes it curlier. On the flip side, my hair works almost the opposite!
My hair is fine textured (though I have a lot of it making my hair look thick). I believe largely because it is fine, my hair is easily weighed down by water.
If I leave my hair wet for a longer time, the weight of the water in my hair will pull my hair straighter than if I help it dry faster. So, your hair may be curlier if you diffuse it, or it may be curlier if you leave it wet longer! Related post of mine: Comparing Comparing air drying and diffusing wavy hair.
Your haircut. How your hair is cut can impact how much your waves/curls can clump together, which can make a difference in how wavy or curly it looks. I like to explain it this way. When someone has naturally straight hair and uses a curling iron to make a curl, they don’t curl each individual hair, right?
Instead, they grab a small section of hair, that they wrap around the curling iron together to make one curl that is made up of dozens of hairs. Natural waves or curls work similarly, so dozens or more hairs will “group together” to make a single curl. We call these ‘curl clumps’.
This is part of why brushing hair straightens/loosens wavy hair, is it breaks up those curl clumps. Part of what helps hair naturally clump together is the way our hair is cut. Hair that is of the same length will clump together best.
While having a few layers is fine, having a TON of layers, which is essentially what using hair thinning sheers or razor cutting hair does is create tons of layers, can prevent hair from clumping and make it straighter or poofier. On the other hand, having hair cut in layers can help hair to clump well and curl better.
Your hair length. Sometimes people find that if their hair gets really long it gets too heavy to be wavy. At the same time, it’s common for wavy hair to require a few inches of length before it starts to twist, so hair that is really short may become straighter too.
In other words, you may find that your hair is only wavy sometimes and that is when it’s the ‘right’ length to be able to be wavy.
Protein. Moisture-protein balance is the aspect of natural wavy haircare that I personally find the most confusing, and I think a lot of other people probably agree! I am far from a protein/moisture balance expert, but one thing I have noticed is that my hair will get straighter if it really needs a protein treatment.
This is most noticeable on the left front section of my head, where I have a straighter patch of hair. I have a naturally uneven curl pattern (as many people, if not most people, do!) so that section is always looser than the rest of my head, just naturally.
However, if my hair needs a protein treatment, that section will be especially straight (like in the photo above). So if you aren’t really paying attention to whether your hair products are heavy in protein, heavy in moisture or both, you may find that your hair is only wavy sometimes, and that’s probably after you use more protein-containing products.
Other hair care techniques. If you’ve been trying to embrace your waves already and sometimes it works, and sometimes your hair turns out straighter, this is likely due to small changes in your techniques.
It can also be responses to the weather or your moisture or protein levels. If you’re relatively new though and feel like your results are really inconsistent, I’d recommend being a lot more intentional with even the small details of your haircare routine.
Make just one small change at a time so you can learn the impact of each technique on your results. If you’ve been making a lot of changes to your routine or aren’t cautious to keep the same routine, those small changes are likely causing big differences in your results. Technique matters a lot more than products, so you want to be really intentional with your techniques.
For example, whether or not you plop or microplop, how long you scrunch for, whether or not you diffuse, how much gel you use (which may impact whether or not you get a gel cast, whether you wet style or damp syle), and other factors can all make a difference.
Related blog post of mine: Having An Uneven Curl Pattern & How I Tighten My Straighter Section
How Can You Make Your Hair Wavy Consistently?
If your hair is wavy sometimes and you want to make it wavy more often, changes are, with the right routine and hair products, you can! This is especially true if you are not currently using any leave-in hair products.
If you want your hair to turn out wavy, I’d recommend starting to use gel or mousse. For many people, that will make the biggest difference. I have a blog post sharing the easiest curly girl method starter routine for newbies. It’s designed to be minimal so as not to overwhelm people who are new or just looking for a basic wavy hair routine.
If you’re turned off by the idea of using gel, I’d recommend my post “Do I really have to use gel?” as it helps explain why gel is important for embracing naturally wavy hair, and also explains why it’s not as yucky to use as it often sounds to people who are new. In a nutshell, using gel doesn’t mean you have to live with sticky, crunchy, or dirty feeling hair.
Hi, my hair is usually straight but as you mention, if I sleep wit wet hair I got some nice waves in the morning, but they don’t last long, maybe because the length of my hair. I will definitely try some of your tips!
I’d love to hear how it goes! My top tip for making waves last longer would be to try gel or mousse. It can be a bit of an adjustment if you aren’t used to using products but using something for hold definitely makes the biggest difference in how long wavy hair hangs around. 🙂
I brush my hair right after the shower these days. Is that an issue? When I brush it in the shower, it sometimes comes out wavier, and sometimes, when I brush it right after the shower, it becomes wavy anyway. Also, my hair is wavier when it’s dry than when it’s wet, which is weird to me.
My hair is straight When I brush it but when I don’t shower for a couple of days it becomes a little wavy.I don’t know if my hair wavy or straight.Any advice or tips?
That’s pretty common! A lot of us think as brushing as just a ‘default’ method for taking care of hair, but it’s really a styling technique for straight hair, that helps subtly make hair straighter. So when people have barely-wavy hair, brushing it can make it straight. If you like how your hair looks when you brush it, of course it’s totally fine to do that! But with your hair getting wavy if you don’t touch it for a couple of days, that tells me that your hair is naturally wavy and could probably stay wavy longer if you started to treat it more like wavy hair, which would mean not brushing it after your shower, and using a product with hold like gel or mousse. Again though, either way is fine – it’s just a styling choice, and you have a hair type that gives you both options based on your comment.
My hair was soft, and when I moved to Turkey after one or two years, my hair became curly before puberty, and it does not become smooth, neither in summer nor in winter, and its appearance is very dry and very wavy. Will my hair return to being soft as it was? Please reply.
My guess is that the hormone changes you experienced impacted your hair’s texture and curl pattern. Sometimes people find that their hair stays the same after puberty for the rest of their lives. Others will find that it changes back or changes in a different way after pregnancy, postpartum or menopause. If the physical feel of your hair (how soft it feels to the touch) is what bothers you most, you may be able to soften it some with deep conditioning treatments or other changes to your routine.
hi I think I have wavy/curly hair. I usually leave it super wet scrunch some heat protectant and gel in then diffuse. First time I did it I used no gel and it worked out well, other times I’ve used gel and it’s worked out good as well, I did it the exact same today and it looks like a very loose wave not my normal pattern. I have thick, coarse, medium length hair and I honestly after lots of research have no idea how to work with it.
A lot of people like to say that wavy (and/or curly) hair has a “mind of its own”. It comes from that experience of how it seems like you can do the exact same routine on two different days and get pretty different results sometimes. My personal belief is that it isn’t really your hair having a mind of its own, but it’s instead that our hair is really sensitive to tiny changes in our routines. So something like scrunching less, using more or less leave in conditioner, whether we diffused our hair on low or high heat, whether the weather or climate in our home was humdid or dry as we were letting our hair dry, whether we used one and a half tablespoons of gel or 2 tablespoons of gel per section – you get the idea. I think we often feel like we did things exactly the same, but in reality one small thing was slightly different and that can really change our results sometimes. To try to learn what those things are, I recommend documenting your hair routine and paying really close attention to things like how many times you scrunched your hair to get exceess water out at the end of your shower, to the settings on your hair dryer, to how much time you were walkign around between ending your shower and starting to diffuse your hair, etc. If you detail everything and take photos of your results each day and compare them, you may be able to pick up on patterns like ‘oh on the days when I Take an extra 5 minutes between my shower and starting to diffuse, my waves turn out a lot looser” or similar.