Shortly after discovering the curly girl method and realizing my hair was wavy, I wanted to know what my curl pattern was. I don’t really even know why I wanted to know. I just did. I looked at curl pattern charts and found most of them really confusing. I thought I would make a wavy hair chart guide that would be a bit easier to make sense of!
Wavy Hair Number
Wavy hair is “type 2” hair, spanning from 2a to 2c. 2B waves are shaped like the letter S, while 2a waves are looser, and 2C waves are tighter.
2b? 3a? What do these wavy hair numbers or curly hair numbers mean? I found them really confusing at first. I would look at different curl pattern charts and feel like the images shown would vary dramatically. I think finding your curl pattern from those charts is confusing because they show you an entire head of hair, often with varying wavy hair numbers on their head.
I found the same to be true of looking up #2bhair or similar on Instagram or other places online. If you look at any given curl pattern tag, you’ll see a dramatic range of curl patterns. How confusing! It’s common for people with wavy hair to have more than 1 wavy hair category that they fit into.
It just doesn’t really make sense to me to try to give a single curl pattern to most people. It makes way more sense to give a type to individual waves/curls. So I’ve taken some photos to help show you how to find your wavy hair number for your individual waves or curls. Most likely, you have multiple.
