Authors: Lorraine Massey,Michele Bender
B003YL4KS0 EBOK (9 page)
Including healthy fats in your diet is important for shiny, thick locks. One of the first things you notice when a person has anorexia is dull, lifeless, thinning hair. Healthy fats keep your scalp hydrated, leaving your hair looking lush
and shiny. Healthy fats include omega-3 essential fatty acids, which can be found in foods like avocado, ground flax seeds, flax seed oil, coconut oil, salmon, sardines, egg yolks, spinach, and walnuts, and include monounsaturated fats found in olives, olive oil, and nuts such as almonds and cashews. Trace minerals like zinc, magnesium, and selenium may help thinning hair or hair loss. You’ll find them in raw nuts like almonds, walnuts, and cashews, seeds like pumpkin seeds, whole grains like brown rice, beans, and oats. To keep hair from thinning, be sure to get enough iron, which is plentiful in beef, turkey, eggs, and beans, and hyaluronic acid, which is found in chicken stock made from chicken bones.
CURL-OGRAPHYEach curly head is a complex tonsorial topology containing many different curl formations. Here are the various curls that can happily coexist on one head:
•
Canopy curls: The top layer of curls on your head, which suffer the most abuse from the environment and too much touching.•
Crouching curls: The protected layers of tightly coiled curls found close to the scalp and underneath the canopy. (I like to call them “crouching curls, hidden gorgeousness.”)•
Halo: A loving word for the frizz around the crown of the head. You can tell whether you have a high or low frizz factor by how much halo you have.•
Hermit curls: Tight, coiled-back curls hiding near the nape of the neck that aren’t obvious unless you pull them out and hold them down. Once you let go, they spring right back into hiding.•
East-west curls: Hair that balloons out on either side of the head but lies flat on top, making you look like the Sphinx or Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna on
Saturday Night Live
(below).
•
North-south curls: Elongated by gravity, these curls hang longer.
CURL CONFESSIONShelley Ozkan
retail merchandiserMy first—and worst—hair trauma occurred when I was nine. I had very long, curly hair that fell halfway down my back, and I loved wearing it loose and carefree. My parents, who thought my hair looked unruly, announced that if I didn’t start taking care of it, I’d have to get it cut off. One day, in the dead of winter, my mother made good on her threat and dragged me to a beauty parlor to get my hair cut in a short shag. I was so humiliated by the result that I decided to wear a knit cap to school until my hair grew back.
Don’t even ask me what I went through in high school. It was the late seventies, when everyone but me had straight Farrah Fawcett hair. (I wonder if she had any idea how many curly girls suffered because of her hairstyle.) I’d wash my hair every night, blow-dry it straight, and pull it back in a ponytail. Then I’d wake up at 6
A.M
. and wrap it around hot rollers to complete the straightening treatment. The day of my senior prom, I was even more obsessed than usual with the weather report. We lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it is very humid, and the May mist is a nightmare. I was wearing a to-die-for, off-the-shoulder gown, and I wanted my hair to be equally sleek. When I woke up that morning, the weather was hot and humid, and as the hours passed, the air remained laden with moisture. I gave up and let my hair do its thing.When I emerged from my bedroom, my mother looked stunned. “Your hair looks beautiful,” she said. “That’s how you should always wear it.” I was horrified by my hair. I’d imagined myself as Farrah Fawcett but I’d morphed into Shirley Temple.
When we arrived at the prom, I locked eyes across the ballroom with Mark, the boy I’d had a crush on since fourth grade. Like a scene from a movie, we walked toward each other, meeting halfway. “You look so beautiful,” he said. “I can’t believe what your hair looks like.” We kissed passionately, right there in front of our dates. It was a magical moment. (Then he threw up all over his shoes. He was totally wasted. But he loved my hair.)
Today, I have two curly haired children and I’m so happy to say that they love their hair (my boys are pictured on
page 130
). I’ve been following the Curly Girl Method with them since they were born. Their hair has never been tortured with a blow-dryer and I’ve never used shampoo or a comb or brush. In fact, since my husband is curly, too, we don’t have a comb or brush in our entire house!
The place most curly girls go wrong is in the cleansing and styling of their hair. Of course,
all
the information in this book is important for gorgeous, healthy hair, but if you read just one chapter intently, it should be this one. That’s because the most important part of loving and accepting your curls starts in the shower. Adopting this regimen of daily hair care means you’ll have to unlearn a lot of assumptions you have about what constitutes “good” hair grooming, like using shampoo or the notion that you step in the shower and immediately start
fussing with your locks. But I guarantee this curly girl approach will change your life with your hair.
SHAMPOO
=
SHAM
(trick) +
POO
(the nasty stuff)
Go No-poo!
The first unorthodox step is to throw out every bottle of shampoo in the bathroom and get rid of your blow-dryer (unless you use it with a diffuser, which we’ll talk about on
page 55
), flat irons, brushes, and hot combs! I’m going to show you how to keep your hair and scalp clean with sulfate-free cleansers or, if you can’t find a sulfate-free cleanser, a botanical conditioner (yes, you can cleanse with a conditioner).
Once you break your shampoo dependency, you’ll still be rinsing and cleaning your hair regularly, but in a way that will keep it hydrated and healthy. The harsh detergents found in most shampoos strip hair of its lubrication and cause the hair’s cuticle to stand straight up like guards at the gate, so things like dirt and product buildup can’t get out. 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!
Instead, sulfate-free cleansers and botanical conditioners soften and protect the hair. They keep the hair’s cuticle closed during the cleansing process, which prevents tangling and matting, and allow whatever is in your hair to exit easily when rinsing. Some curly girls may question whether they can truly clean their hair and scalp without sudsy shampoo. But I promise that the method I suggest—firmly massaging the entire surface of your scalp using circular motions—will get your scalp and hair clean.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A LITTLE BLOW-DRYING. . .A lot of curly girls think that blow-drying and flat-ironing their hair straight once in a while is okay. But it’s not. Straightening your curls occasionally is like smoking a cigarette every once in a while—you’d be surprised how much damage can be done from just that once! It takes a while for curls to take shape and just be, and even one blow-fry or flat-ironing can set you back. Over time and with good care, the memory of the curl locks in, the frizz disappears, and your curls elongate. You’re on auto-curl pilot and you don’t want to derail it!
The friction of your fingertips combined with cleanser or conditioner will loosen and break up dirt and product buildup, leaving the scalp cleansed and deodorized and your curls undisturbed,
but clean. After all, friction is a time-tested method of cleaning (think of a washing machine churning). The massaging motion also stimulates blood flow to the scalp, which brings nutrients to the hair follicles, helping hair to grow and stay healthy.
In this chapter, you’ll find out the cleansing and styling routines for these types of curly hair—corkscrew, botticelli, corkicelli, and cherub curls. Since wavy and s’wavy curls and fractal and zigzag curls have some different steps, each has a separate chapter. (For wavy and s’wavy, see
chapter 5
, Catching a Wave,
page 51
. For fractal and zigzag, see
chapter 6
, Multi-curl-tural Hair,
page 61
). However, the following general advice applies to all curls and waves no matter how big, small, tightly wound, or loose.
DIRT AGENTSWhen I mention “cleanser” I always mean a sulfate-free cleanser, by “conditioner” I mean a botanical conditioner, and by “gel” I mean one that’s free of harsh ingredients such as alcohol and silicone. I sometimes talk about cleanser and conditioner interchangeably because for some curly girls, using a conditioner is just as good as using a cleanser for cleaning. (See
chapter 8
,
page 79
, for pointers on how to read a hair-care ingredient label and how to determine which products are good or bad for your curls.)
