What Causes Frizzy Hair? My “Ah-ha!” Moment + See the Results!

I’ve been making my way through Curly Girl: The Handbook and started on many of the basic steps. I am still trying to figure out what works for me. My hair is VERY curly, especially when you don’t “mess” with it and follow the steps in this handbook.

It’s been quite difficult for me adjust and actually LIKE my hair down and so curly. I’m working on it. I’ll be blogging a lot more about it as I go along but I wanted to share my recent “ah-ha!” moment about frizz.

You can see my frizzy curls in the picture above. And that was actually on a pretty good day before I started the Curly Girl Method.

What causes Frizz?  For most of my life I have just thought “well, that is the way Curly hair is!”. I  knew that when it was more humid, my hair was more frizzy.   When I was in New York City a few months ago I was wearing my hair straight. I was literally going back to the hotel room every couple hours and doing a “refresher” with the straightener as my hair would get frizzy after 20 minutes. Little did I know — I was only making the problem worse!!

I was sitting reading through Curly Girl: The Handbook by Lorraine Massey, when I came across this:

“The main reason we curly girls are not happy with our hair is because of that curly girl nemesis: frizz (which I now call ‘halo’). In fact, many women don’t even know they have gorgeous curls because their hair is suffocating under layers of dreadful, dry frizz. I have become what I call ‘frizz assist’ so I can help you understand the science behind frizz. Once you do, you’ll never look at it the same way again.

“So here’s your frizz education: Most of us spend days, months, and years dehydrating our already dry hair with harsh,  detergent-filled shampoos, blow-dryers, and chemical treatments. It’s the natural inclination of the little strands of your hair to literally lift up off your head and outward to quench their thirst from moisture in the air due to their molecular structure. These lifted hair fibers create a poof of frizz. This is why curly girls who straighten their hair dread days when it’s humid or it rains. (I actually have a chart from the 1500s that use hair as a weather barometer! It sounds crazy but it makes sense.)

“The solution, however, is simple: moisture. Once the hair fibers are sufficiently  hydrated with conditioner, they will hold onto the moisture they need and the frizz will go away. Curly hair is porous, but the conditioner fills the holes a bit like spackle on walls and smoothes the surface. And thanks to gravity, the weight of the conditioner pulls the hair down and even makes it appear longer in some cases. With enough hydration, anyone and everyone can have beautifully defined curls without the frizz!”

OH. HOLY. SHHHHHHH!

Yes. That was my “AH-HA!!” moment.  I had absolutely NO idea. My hair was actually lifting up OFF MY HEAD trying to get moisture. WOW. In fact I thought that I needed to make it drier when it was humid out because “it was so humid”. {Head bang!}

Curly Girl: The Handbook lays out how to take care of your curls and embrace them. Making it so that you are not doing things to dry them out. Like I said above, I am not even done reading and not doing everything laid out in the book yet but just from the few steps that I have been doing, after a couple days you can see here there is less frizz…

And after a couple more days….

You can see a HUGE difference there!   The part that I am fighting with now is I am not sure I like how tight my curls are. Especially at this length.

Do you have curly hair? Frizz? I definitely recommend this book!