Wavy Hair Care

18 Ways To Make Wavy Hair Curlier

September 27, 2020 by Emily Evert 7 Comments

Everyone wants something a little different than what they get, or so the old adage goes. It’s common for people with naturally wavy hair to want to know how to make wavy hair curlier. Maybe they’re a 2a looking to achieve 2c waves.

Maybe they’re a 2c looking to step into the 3-range with “real” curls. Or maybe they don’t have a specific curl type goal in mind, but they’re just trying to enhance their natural hair pattern as much as they can. Whichever of those might be you, this post is for you!

How To Make Wavy Hair Curlier

To make wavy hair curlier scrunch your hair while in the shower, and then diffuse instead of air dry so that it dries quicker and tighter. Use lightweight products to keep hair light. Make sure your hair has enough protein. Curl enhancers can tighten your pattern, too.

That’s the short answer. The long answer is to follow with 18 specific ways you can make your wavy hair curlier. Before getting into those in detail I want to say that curly hair is not objectively better than wavy hair. However, I fully support people choosing hair that make them feel best.

If that means their hair when they just wash it and brush it, I think that’s great. If they feel best when they straighten or curl their hair, that’s great too. If they fall somewhere in the ‘natural’ haircare range, that’s just as good.

I see none of these or objectively better or worse than the others. I’m writing this post because I know there are many wavies out there who want to tighten their pattern. If that’s what makes you happy, I’m happy to try to help you out.

Okay, now that we’ve established that all hair patterns are good hair patterns – on with the 18 ways, broken into a few categories.

How to Train Straight Hair to Curl {Can You?}

September 28, 2020 by Emily Evert 8 Comments

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How to get natural curly hair for straight hair

You can’t turn truly straight hair into wavy or curly hair using natural methods. You can use heat tools or perm it, though!

Okay, I confess, this header was a bit of a tease or trick. When doing research for my other post, how to make wavy hair curlier, I saw that variations of how to train straight hair to be naturally curly is searched a lot.

From the last few years hanging out in curly girl method and naturally wavy hair communities, I know there are misconceptions surrounding this. I thought it was worth addressing. Can you train straight hair to be naturally curly?

No. You can’t. The same is true of wavy hair. If your hair is truly just wavy, you can’t just make it curly naturally.

There’s nothing wrong with using a curling iron or perming your hair if you have straight hair and want wavy hair. Or if you have wavy hair and want curly hair. However, if you are interested in natural hair care, please don’t start a natural wavy hair journey with the expectation of your hair becoming wavier or curlier at any point down the line.

I regularly see people on wavy forums who are 2a, asking about getting into the 3-range and expecting it can just be made to happen without heat or chemicals. That isn’t how natural hair care usually works. Is it possible that someone out there had really damaged hair that was 2a and after years of gentle haircare and learning the best products for their hair type, they reached 3a? Sure.

It would be the exception though, not the rule – and that means they had curly hair naturally, and it was just damaged to make it subtly wavy, and then was repaired. My larger point is – you can’t just pick any curl pattern and make it happen with the curly girl method.

In my post about making wavy hair curlier, you’ll see that it’s almost exclusively about avoiding weighing down your pattern. A lot of people care for their hair in ways that weigh it down or damage their pattern.

For those people, if they stop doing the things that weigh their hair down, or begin to be gentler with their hair so that their new growth will be less damaged…their hair can appear to get curlier. It is their natural pattern, though.

Wavy Hair Not Curling Anymore | Why Won’t My Hair Wave or Curl Anymore?

October 13, 2020 by Emily Evert 7 Comments

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Earlier this year I was struggling with getting my waves to last very long. (Ps – my post how to make wavy hair last longer focuses on that topic). In the past, I would get 3 days out of a wash day. At first, day 3 just looked rough. Then day 2 wasn’t looking good, and day 3 was almost straight.

When I realized that my favorite mousse had been reformulated, at first I thought that must be to blame. So I bought a new mousse, and it didn’t’ give me any hold. So I bought another mousse – again, no hold. I started to worry that I’d have to go back to gel.

Why do all of these mousses not have any hold for me even though all these other people online say they get a hard hold from these same products?

This is what day 2 or day 3 usually looks like for me. For a while this is what it would look like immediately after scrunching out the crunch! Fewer waves, way less definition, and it would collapse to almost-straight quite quickly.

When I went back to my old mousse and got no cast at all, I started getting suspicious. While I didn’t get long-lasting waves the week or two prior, I did at least get a cast. Now I wasn’t getting a cast at all, and this was the same bottle of mousse. It couldn’t be the product – it had to be my hair. But how or why?

I was almost 2 years into the curly girl method. Why would my hair suddenly change now? I was confused.

Does The Curly Girl Method Turn Straight Hair Curly?

October 15, 2020 by Emily Evert 20 Comments

One of my sisters had expressed an interest in finding out if her hair was naturally wavy. In fact, that’s part of what inspired my other blog post How To Test If Your Hair Is Wavy (before starting the curly girl method).

However, instead of just showing her how to test if her hair was wavy, I decided to have her try my exact routine. I realized that if I taught her my exact routine, that we could make a blog post showing others how the routine does not make the curls.

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