I have 100 (ish) days to get my curls wedding-ready
Curly Hair = PHD in cosmetology or whatever (not really but kinda)
I’ve never known what to do with my hair.
I grew up in Miami so I remember the first time I straightened my whole head of hair with a flimsy pink flatiron like it was yesterday … It felt like pure joy, bliss, freedom, a whole new world. Or so I’d thought.
I spent the next decade or so chasing sleek-straight hair. Each week, I’d wash and flatiron it and pray to God there wouldn’t be a huge hurricane or something to ruin all my hard work.
But the older I got and the longer I spent living in a place with winter weather, the more I missed my cute little ringlets.
I watched people embracing their texture with a frustrated jealousy thinking, “my hair could do that too if I tried.”
So I decided to try. And three years ago I stopped straightening my hair.
I went from blowouts once or twice a week to practically quitting cold-turkey. Surprisingly, it wasn’t very difficult to stop doing the actual straightening (in fact, I loved taking that chore off my list) but I did have a hard time making my hair look good without heat.
I worried my curls were gone forever, that I’d never see them again, I threw many a tantrum over a slicked-back pony that wouldn’t stay smooth and still I persevered.
Until a fateful wash day when diffusing … worked. I’m not sure if it was the weather, or luck, or if I’d just simply gotten the hang of it but after about a year I could confidently say I had curls my curls back. Yay!
… And it took about two more years after that before I actually liked them again but that’s a story for another time.
Which leads us to where we are now: 100 days (99 actually but who’s counting?) out from my wedding and I finally understand my natural texture.
I know I don’t want it straight on my wedding day. I’ve worked so hard to get it back to its glory that it would be offensive to tame it for a traditional bridal look. Blegh.
The issue is there is little to no inspo out there. And if I don’t know how to troubleshoot the stuff that’ll make me second-guess the “no straightening” rule, no one else will.
I’m excited but apprehensive. Those of us with curls are pretty much left to our own devices when it comes to dealing with our hair. No product works the same on two people and the thing that worked yesterday may not work again today or tomorrow or the next day.
It’s our job to figure out our curl pattern, texture, porosity, etc. And when those things seemingly “don’t work,” every salon you walk into will try to sell you anti-frizz treatments or relaxers. I’ve tried those too, by the way, and they made my hair look dull and dead.
The answer, I found out, is to power through. Let your hair look odd, embrace bad hair days, frizz, inconsistent curls, you name it. Eventually, you will figure out the formula with the right order of operations, I promise.
But here’s the thing — no matter how expertly you handle them, curls are unpredictable.
So right now I’m auditing my routine (for lack of a better term) and documenting what my hair looks like on any given day. I’m keeping an eye out for things to improve, ways to troubleshoot, and insights on what factors make my hair behave this way or that. And in the next few weeks, I’ll be testing out a bunch of styles to see how they hold up throughout the day.
Before you ask, I have a stylist booked for my wedding and I trust her with my life but I’m a tactile learner so I gotta do the experiment and figure it out for myself or else I won’t feel ready.
This process, hopefully, will prep me to show up for myself as myself on a very important day.
I want to reject the idea that curls are “messy” or “undone” or “informal.” My hair does not need to be sleek straight for a work meeting or important life event and I will be 33 years old before I get to fully embrace that freedom. It’s time.
I’ll be documenting it all … the wins, the disasters, and the learning curves … and sharing it here for all who want to follow along.
And if there are any other current or former curly-haired brides out there, say hi! What did you do? How did you feel? What do you wish you’d known three months before the big day? Let a girl know.