Products I'm Loving...

Raise your hand if you have strangely textured hair that has a mind of its own! (Raises hand)

Unless you're one of the rare, lucky people with naturally perfectly coiffed hair, I'm sure we've all been there. Especially for ladies (and gentlemen!) with some sort of texture in your hair, it can be much like an unpredictable monster a lot of the time. Some days, it'll be beautifully consistent throughout, and other days it'll be super flat in some places and super textured in others. Some of you, like me, also know the struggle that is frizz.

This is what my hair looks like after I've freshly washed it. You can see the frizz up by the crown and how inconsistent the curl pattern is. Only on the rarest of occasions have I been able to get it to become defined throughout without having the dreaded crunch characteristic of almost all gels. I'm not even sure what I did to achieve those few good hair days, but I'll share with you a list of products that helped me get there!

Deep Conditioner

Recently, I've been loving this intensive treatment from Organix. I apply it and leave it in for about five minutes while I'm in the shower. I then rinse it out and continue with my routine. It adds shine and bounce without weighing down my hair. I typically don't use conditioner when I wash my hair, so using this once a week really helps. As soon as I apply it, I can feel my hair becoming softer.

Leave-In Conditioner

I only started using a leave in conditioner in the last couple of weeks, but I'm already hooked. My hair has quite a bit of damage from using heat tools and drying hair, so it can be a little dry and brittle. Garnier's leave in conditioner adds a lot of moisture and slip to my hair; I love it! It doesn't have a very strong scent, which is nice, especially if you are using multiple products.

Gel

Because I have super dense, thick hair, I need a product with lots of hold otherwise my hair will get all sorts of pouffy. These gels from Herbal Essences are the bomb dot com. I used up all of the one on the right, and bought a new one, which happens to have a different packaging. Funnily enough, the first bottle I used seems to be the most recent packaging. They both have great hold, though they do make my hair crunchy. You can always SOTC if neede (scrunch out the crunch, post coming later). It smells super fruity, which I love, and does a great jobs holding the shape of my waves and occasional curls.

Mousse

When there is a lot of humidity abound, I look to mousses to help keep frizz at bay. I really do love the Herbal Essences Totally Twisted line, so I use this mousse for some extra hold. It has a very similar scent to the gel, so you don't have to worry about clashing with other products. I don't know how it would hold up with products of other lines that also have strong scents. This really does help me to keep my waves intact when it would normally be super all over the place. (Descriptive, aren't I?)

Heat Protectant

If you've been around the beauty blogosphere, pinterest, or youtube at all, there's a good chance you have already seen and heard about this product. I LOVE using TRESemme's heat tamer spray when I'm in a rush and want to diffuse my hair. It's super cheap, and effective! I highly recommend it to anyone who uses heat products; it won't completely rule out heat damage, but it will cut down the amount significantly.

Here's what my hair looks like when I've used all of these products except the heat protectant, and let it air dry. It's still a work in progress, but it's coming along! Let me know in the comments if there are any "holy grail" products I should try!

Until next time,

My Hair Journey

My whole life, I've wanted beautiful, wavy, or curly hair. Any kind of texture, really.


Growing up, I had stereotypical Asian, pin-straight hair. Unfortunately, although it was mostly straight, I had issues with frizzies popping up around the crown of my head. (I blame puberty.) No matter which countless hairstyles I tried, my hair was always, in my eyes, boring. I made some very questionable choices to try to make it interesting.

Look at the choppy cut, and how flat my hair was! Not to mention the unnecessarily large sweatshirt. Eventually, I tried to embrace the straightness and focused on combatting frizz. I even tried Japanese straightening perms for a couple years. It's an arduous process, involving treating your hair with a chemical straightening keratin product, straightening your hair with a flat iron, and then deactivating the straightener with another product. It served its purposed fairly well, but it was a bit pricey, especially as my hair was fairly long most of my life.

Over the last couple of years, my hair has become increasingly frizzy, and started to have a slight bend where it hit the nape of my neck. It also started having a slight bend at the ends.

This picture is from September 2014. Because it was very frustrating, I ended up straightening my hair, or occasionally curling it. You can imagine the kind of heat damage my hair suffered from. The following October, I chopped off 8 inches of hair to donate. My hair was much more manageable, and actually tended tombe less frizzy! It lasted a while until June, when my hair became much more frizzy than before (as if that was possible!), so I did some digging on Pinterest. I started learning about hair types, and realized that I may not be meant to have pin-straight hair. I tried scrunching my hair for the first time that summer. I was thrilled to realized that I might have some texture in my hair that I had been trying to suppress for the longest time. As I did more and more research, I tried diffusing my hair. It didn't quite work out the way I wanted it to, but it's still a work in process.

Here's what happened the first time I tried to diffuse my hair. If it was curlier, I might be able to pull off a Tori Kelly-esque style. I've found out that my hair is probably a 2B. Unfortunately, it still takes a LOT of coaxing, and I've yet to figure how to best style it.

On this blog, I'll be mainly writing about my adventures in learning what the best products for my hair type are, and establishing a good routine. I hope you'll stick around for the ride!