I Used To Cringe At The Thought Of Using Gel
I remember when I first started to consider trying the curly girl method, the thing that I was most hesitant about was gel.
I had always just used shampoo and conditioner. The only time I used anything else was for formal events like weddings, where I had an updo that I was trying to preserve. I didn’t like that hair-sprayed feeling.
In my teens when I realized that my flat iron was damaging my hair and I decided to start using a heat-protecting spray, I tried a few varieties before I found one I could live with. I didn’t want my hair to feel like it had any products in it.
I was born in the early 90’s and have a lot of older siblings. I remember some of my older brothers using blue or green gel in their hair in the late 90’s or early 00’s to make their hair hard and “spikey”. Hair gel was something I associated with wet-looking, stiff hair. I didn’t want my hair to look wet or feel stiff.
So when I started looking up curly girl method routines and finding that almost every routine included gel…I was disheartened. For some reason, it didn’t immediately occur to me that these people I was watching clearly had hair that wasn’t wet-looking or stiff, so it probably didn’t feel super yucky either.
I tried to skip gel, at first. I just tried to not brush my hair and let it dry to see what it would do.
