I’m one of those girls who beauty stuff just doesn’t come naturally to: I’m pretty sure there was some class the rest of you went to on a day I was absent that explained things like how to get your eyeliner to do that wing thing or exactly what you’re supposed to do when faced with both a hairdryer and a round brush. It’s the kind of knowledge my sisters – and I have four of them – seemed to glean through some sort of osmosis, by the time they were teenagers. I kept waiting around for my own osmosis period to begin, but -while I somehow managed to pick up how to make perfect meringue cookies and also acquired the ability to wrangle 30+ 4-year-olds in need of a nap- I never did seem to pick up just how to get my hair not to curl up into little devil horns three hours after I’d ‘fixed’ it.
Since this sort of information was innate for me, I’ve tried various methods of picking things up, all to varying degrees of success: Pestering aforementioned sisters; Youtube; books. And I’ve somehow managed to cobble together enough basic knowledge that I (mostly) don’t leave the house looking like I forgot to brush my hair in the past three days, and that I have a working knowledge of at least three ‘fancier’ hair-dos that I can pull out for weddings and what not. I still don’t even own a hair dryer, however, so let’s not think I’m in anyway advanced, here.
And then came my niece, who was, for the first 3 years of her life, largely bald, and whose head decided to make up for that fact by then sprouting the densest most sproingy curls ever. And did you know that taking care of curly hair is different than taking care of wavy hair (which is what mine is) or straight hair (which is what my baby sisters’ hair was, back when I had charge of bathing and brushing their hair)? Did you know that? Because I did not.
And so, every bath night was torturous, and every hair combing even more so, and I recalled times when my own mother had made me want to hide underneath the table until she’d put away the dreaded comb, and feared passing on a legacy of hair hatred to the girl I would shelter from hatred of any kind, if it were possible. And as she got older, not even by that much, it started to come about that she would show up at our house with her hair straightened, that she would scribble over pictures of curly haired girls I doodled, that she would proclaim that ‘only straight hair looks good.’
Back to the library for me, then. And there I found Lorraine Massey’s Curly Girl Handbook. It’s a short, easily organized, simply-written book that talks a lot about overcoming years of treating your hair wrong and finally getting it right, in relation to curls. It’s broken up by curl-types, (which, as usual, got me confused, because there’s always some elements of two different types that fit, and then you have to figure out which fits more), but there’s also a lot of general information, as well as dos and don’ts.
One of the big don’ts is in regards to shampoo – this author is against it completely, along with blow-drying, flat ironing, hot combing and even most brushes. According to Massey, “The harsh detergents found in most shampoos strip hair of its lubrication & cause the hair’s cuticle to stand straight up …Curly hair is a dry, porous surface, so it holds onto the detergent-filled shampoo like a sponge, which is why it’s so hard to fully rinse it all out. This is a disaster for organic hair fiber – especially curly hair!” She recommends, sulfate-free cleansers and botanical conditioners, which are suds free, for the most part, and take some adjusting to, but would be worth it if their benefits were as great as Massey promises. It was hard for me to wrap my head around not shampooing an 8-year-old’s sweaty head, but the cleansers she mentions are still powerful, just more gentle and less detergent-filled, and have a side bonus of being less smelly, so we like that around here.
The not combing or brushing thing is harder, as my niece’s hair can look approximately like a lion’s mane one minute and like a bird’s next the next, but we have started following the rules about only combing or brushing when it’s dripping wet, and using So. Much. Conditioner. that her hair is almost tangle-free (unless she’s just get up, which is just a free for all).
The book is good about giving tips for different hair types and textures – my own hair has gotten wavier and thinner as I’ve gotten older, so it’s proven helpful to me as well – and offers plenty of styling advice and practical questions and answers, along with real life pictures and models. My version of the book also came with a companion DVD.
The one of the few things I think Massey seems to overlook is that all of her tips take a lot of time (including, but not limited to creating your own cleansers or ‘laying down on a yoga mat to blow out your hair’, which would take me approximately 75 hours, and my hair is not that thick anymore), but I’m not sure if that’s just one of those ‘me things’, where I just don’t actively anticipate spending a ridiculous amount of time on my hair, and other women do? Another is that some of her advice – massaging the scalp with different oils, for example – seems (at best) contradictory, especially for people with oily hair, whom don’t get a mention.
Aside from those few little quibbles however, I would recommend reading The Curly Girl Handbook, if you’ve somehow found yourself in the role of caretaker to a curly head of hair – either your own or someone else’s. It’s saved us a bunch of tears, at the very least, and helped my niece to understand that, while there are different rules for her type of hair, it doesn’t make it any less gorgeous. (Because, seriously, if you could see this kid’s curls, you’d cry when she wanted them straightened, too.)