In this podcast episode, I talk about some of the differences in routines that could impact your curls. I highly recommend you don’t worry about changing products until you have spent a few months with the Curly Girl Method and have kept up a simple routine with safe products.

Why Would You Need to Change Products?

After giving your hair a chance to adjust, you may find that the products you are using are not right for your hair. Products could have a variety of problems:

• Too light (doesn’t weigh hair down enough and hair may dry fluffy—this may also happen if you aren’t adding enough of the leave-in product)
• Too heavy (makes hair feel lotiony, weighed down or grimy when fully dry)
• Not enough slip (doesn’t make hair feel smooth when added and may dry frizzy)
• Wrong ingredients (your hair might be reacting poorly to certain key ingredients, like coconut, avocado, oils or other ingredients that are technically safe)
• Bad ingredients (an accidental slip up can lead to using a product that has a wax, silicone or drying alcohol and makes the hair react badly with excessive buildup or frizz)
• Not enough balance (all hair needs varying levels of protein and moisture—you will have to figure out your best balance over time)

Remember, it may not be the products. Try changing how much you leave in or how you apply the products (like squishing the hair full of conditioner to work it in or fingercombing at a different point in your routine) before you give up on the product itself.

What Should You Do When Products Aren’t Working?

When you do determine it might be the products that are too heavy or just want to try something different, only change one. You might theorize that a lighter leave-in will give you bouncier curls, but if you change out both your leave-in and gel, you won’t know what is improving and what isn’t. Maybe the new leave-in makes your curls shinier and bouncier, but the new gel leaves your hair flatter and duller—giving you a combined result that isn’t much better than your previous routine. If you had just changed the gel, you would feel how much worse it made your hair. If you had just changed the leave-in you would immediately notice the improvement, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Don’t throw non-working products away! What you might find is that it was your application or the point in your routine that mattered more than the product itself. For the first year I thought my hair hated Vo5, but now I’ve found it actually does a great job if I only use it for the cowash step. Plus, you can use up the products you already have that are safe on days you don’t care as much about the results.

Say I’ve worked out at the gym (so I need to wash my hair), but I know I’m mostly doing things around the house for the next day or two. The perfect time to use up product, give my hair a break or test out new products is when I’m not trying to have a good hair day. I think it’s better for the hair when you change up your best routine sometimes, giving your hair new ingredients and avoiding potential buildup. I’ve always found that switching products seems to help the regular products work better.

What About Protein and Moisture?

One of the trickier parts of the Curly Girl Method is in trying to figure out whether your hair needs more moisture or protein to be balanced. It’s pretty safe to say that at first, your hair is going to crave moisture. For beginners, the recommendation is to focus on getting more moisture into your thirsty curls.

But after a few months, your hair might start to become over moisturized and need protein. With bleached hair, you may find that it needs even more protein than normal. I use protein in my leave-in and gel steps, and I even add it in my cowash from time to time. Around 3.5 months, my hair started getting limp and frizzy because it had reached the point of being over moisturized.

If you think your hair might be over moisturized, you can add protein by swapping out one of your products in your routine to something that has protein in the ingredients. It isn’t recommended that you do a protein treatment unless you are sure you are over moisturized and protein will help. If you go too far the other way in adding too much protein, your hair may become brittle and break easily. It is harder to come back from over protein treated hair than over moisturized hair, so I recommend you go slow with the protein.

Once you’ve added in protein, watch for signs that your hair has had enough. If your hair starts to look dry and a little frizzy, ease off your products that have protein. Try to find a balance that will give you healthy curls. Remember, this will actually change by season in most areas as the climate goes from warm and moist to dry and cold. So, you might need extra moisture in the winter and more protein in the summer.

The post Podcast Episode 4: When Should You Change CG Products? appeared first on MidKid Mama.

If your hair is frizzy, fluffy, wavy, curly, dry, oily or kinky, then the Curly Girl Method is right for you! The method is ideal for hair that is curly (some find they have hidden curls!), but it also works for straight hair as a way of treating hair better. The Curly Girl Method is not a particular line of products, but a way of washing and caring for your hair.

Final Wash

The beginning of your Curly Girl Journey is going to be in doing a final wash. The final wash is using a shampoo with sulfates, but no silicones or waxes. I often recommend Suave Clarifying Shampoo because it is cheap and easy. Once you have done this final shampoo, you won’t use shampoo again (unless you accidentally get a silicone or wax in your hair).

Shampoo isn’t actually cleaning your hair as much as it is stripping oils. The problem is, not only does this remove dirt and grime, it also removes natural hair oils that are good for your scalp and hair. This stripping process causes frizz. In order to tame that frizz, most conditioners and styling products contain silicones—but those silicones can only be stripped out with shampoo. So, this vicious cycle harms your hair over time.

When you stop using shampoo, you don’t stop scrubbing out the dirt. Instead of using shampoo to scrub, you will scrub with an approved (silicone-free) conditioner to co-wash your hair. You don’t need a product called cowash because that literally stands for conditioner-only washing. So using any “safe” (silicone-free) conditioner to wash your hair will work. You will need to scrub the scalp with your finger pads for a longer amount of time than shampoo, but usually only by a few minutes.

So, did you catch that? NO MORE SHAMPOO AFTER THIS STEP.

Finding Safe Ingredients

So, before you start, you will also want to get a conditioner and gel for styling your hair. You can spot bad ingredients by seeing if anything in the list ends in:

• -Cone
• -Conal
• -Xane
• Or is listed as a wax

Dimethicone, for example, is a very popular silicone ingredient. This would require a shampoo to get off of your hair. If you try to cowash with dimethicone in your cowash, leave-in or gel, then you are going to start to get a lot of build-up and frizz because your hair is still coated in the silicone.

Most of the Shea Moisture conditioners are safe, but they can be heavy for many types of hair. I highly recommend starting with the Not Your Mother’s Naturals conditioners for leaving in. Many people love Vo5 and Suave conditioners because they are so cheap and many are safe. I personally use L.A. Looks gel for styling, but there are many options. You are going to want to start very simple, though, so don’t get crazy picking out too many products.

Track Your Progress

Take a before picture. You will be shocked at how things change. Most of the time, the changes are going to be so slow you might not even notice. Once you get into it and get a good routine going, you aren’t even going to remember how bad it was. My kids don’t recognize my before picture.

Have a Best-to-Date Routine

Do your final wash, then start cowashing. You can cowash as often as you want to because it is not hard on your hair. I like to diffuse my hair to cut the drying time and increase the curl definition, but many air dry or let their hair dry overnight. You should only make a small change or two with each wash so you can see what you are really changing. If you get to wild with changing products and ways of applying those products, you won’t be able to tell what really made a negative or positive impact.

Always know your best-to-date routine. That routine is what you fall back on if a change doesn’t make it better. So if you normally squish in your conditioner, you might decide to do everything as normal except rake in the conditioner that next time. If that doesn’t improve on your frizz or clumping, you will then go back to the original routine before making a change the next time. The reason you want to keep track of your best-to-date routine is because you need to have something you can fall back on for times when your hair needs to look its best. This will also help you make educated guesses about how to adjust to get a better result for your hair.

Certain hair is going to like and dislike certain ingredients—but everyone is different. Personally, my hair hates coconut, but two of my four kids do well with coconut in their hair. If I use coconut in my hair—even way far down on the ingredients list—it makes it extra frizzy. At the same time, if I don’t diffuse starting at the roots, my hair is flat and more limp. If I don’t fingercomb my hair long enough after adding my leave-in, then my hair will be frizzier than normal. Every point of your routine can be done many different ways.

On Transition Hair

Perhaps you’ve heard of the transition hair you get with the Curly Girl Method. As your hair adjusts to the new routine, it will have to stop overproducing oils in an attempt to keep up with the stripping that you used to do with shampoo. Your hair might look horrible for a few weeks, or it may look great for a few weeks before starting to look and feel horrible. Transition hair can hit any time in the first few months. For me, my hair looked amazing at first before hitting transition around 3 months.

With transition hair, your hair may feel:

• Limp
• Frizzy
• Producty
• Unclean
• Dull
• Poufy

These are all common with transition hair and you must just press through! You can clarify by adding lemon juice to your cowash, which will help cut the grease faster without stripping the hair. I highly recommend braids, buns, headbands and clips during this time to help hide the hair you are going to hate. But once you get over this hump, you will be able to move on to truly healthy hair.

On Feeling Overwhelmed

This might not really be possible, but try not to feel overwhelmed.

It’s a learning curve that most of us didn’t know existed. There is a lot of information to relearn and ways this can change what you do with your hair. There are so many avaiable products and ways to apply them, it can be very hard to keep track.

We’ve all gotten used to the normal routines and products that we expect to work in our hair. The CGM challenges all of that and goes against what we are most used to. There are groups to help and you can always reach out for support. Start simple and go slowly. It isn’t nearly as hard as it might sound.

Listen to the podcast above and then check out my post about my 9 months progress here.

The post Podcast Episode 2: Starting the Curly Girl Method appeared first on MidKid Mama.

Nine months into the Curly Girl Method and I can’t believe my hair was ever that bad. The thing is, I couldn’t get it to do anything without a curling iron or a straightener. It has SO much product in it for that shot on the left and it wouldn’t do anything but fluff. I was so frustrated with it. I thought pregnancy hormones or bleach had ruined my hair. Straightening or curling it took a lot of time and just made the dryness worse.

What is the Curly Girl Method?

The Curly Girl Method can be done any hair products without silicones or sulfates. That means no shampoos (which use sulfates to harshly strip out oils and silicones). The shampoo isn’t really cleaning your hair, it is stripping out the ingredients you used to tame the mane.

You have to do a “final wash” with a silicone-free shampoo (that has sulfates) to get out all the silicones before starting this method. The first step is to get rid of all of those bad ingredients once and for all. Once the final wash with shampoo is done, you won’t use shampoo again unless you have a slip-up.

Next, you will need to find a “safe” conditioner to use for washing and moisturizing your hair. The goal is to stop stripping your hair and add back the moisture lost over years of damage. Approved (or “safe”) Curly Girl products can be from any brand, but they cannot contain drying alcohols, sulfates, silicones or waxes.

To get started, look at the ingredients of your hair products. They cannot contain any ingredients that end in -xane, -cone or -conal. Dimethicone is a very popular silicone you will see listed in many conditioners and stylers. These silicones will coat your hair and smooth the frizz, but then require shampoo to be washed out (which strips your hair and causes damage). The one exemption is if the silicone ingredient is directly led with PPG and a number—signifying that the silicone has been chemically altered to be water soluble.

Don’t get overwhelmed. It sounds tricky, but you will get the hang of it after practicing. You can also join the Curly Girls! support group on Facebook to get additional help and resources! Once you find the hair products you like, you won’t have to keep checking ingredients because you will know they are safe.

My Curly Girl Journey

I started with Garnier products to get moisture back in my hair. Then after a few months it was clear my hair also needed protein. Too much moisture without a good protein balance can lead to overly soft and mushy hair that gets frizzy. Too much protein and the hair can be brittle, dry and frizzy. Everyone’s hair is different. Similar to a healthy diet, you have to figure out what works best for your hair. My current routine is now more balanced for my hair.

• Not Your Mother’s Conditioner Mango Butter (pink bottle with clear pump)
• Shea Moisture High Porosity Moisture Correct Masque (royal blue tub)
• LA Looks Sport Gel (blue gel)

I am always asked to provide images of the masque, so here is my Amazon Affiliate links for my products. You can sometimes find it in Walgreens or Target as well:

My routine: I scrub my scalp with the NYM conditioner, then rinse completely. Then I add a scoop (about the size of a golfball) of the mask and smooth it into my hair, fingercombing out tangles. Then I add about 5-7 pumps of NYM and smooth onto the dryer parts (ends of my hair and some of the front). I finger comb out all tangles and use a wire brush to gently smooth the hair (this gives me better curl clumps). I wrap my hair in a t-shirt and finish the shower. After getting out, I smooth in the gel, scrunch a tad and diffuse (Xtava Orchid Diffuser is the bomb for long hair!). When it is dry, I smooth on a tad more gel. When everything is 100% dry after that, I gently scrunch any crunchy areas until the curls and waves are soft. No curling irons at all for that picture on the right.

To refresh in the morning, I usually only need some gel and a little scrunching.

Even though you are using a strong-hold gel, your hair shouldn’t be crunchy feeling. Just keep pulsing your hands to scrunch out the crunch. You will break up the gel and have soft curls instead of hard, wet-looking, crunchy ones.

It sounds like a lot, I know. But the routine is much faster than doing my hair ever was before the Curly Girl Method. Before, if I wanted my hair to look good down at all, I had to wash, dry and straighten—which took well over two hours. Now, I can wash and dry all within an hour (which is fast with my long, thick hair that takes days to dry on it’s own). I have full confidence that my hair is going to turn out consistently well.

I did recently get it colored to get closer to my roots color. It set me back a little having to do a final wash again(silicones in the coloring products), but it wasn’t too bad. My hair has never felt better and has never been easier to style than with this method. I even have a lot of new growth around my scalp, which is very common with this method. My scalp feels healthier too.

Our Whole Family is Curly Girl

I do this with the whole family. In fact, I really did it with the kids since Kniya was born, but without knowing what it was called. I had done a lot of research on curls and mixed kids’ hair. I never thought to do it with my own dry, wavy hair, though!

And none of us have the same hair! With 6 different hair types in this house, our routines vary. But it’s been great for all of us! Kniya does better with little-to-no protein in her ingredients list, very light products and no coconut (I also find coconut causes frizz for me). Kamden’s hair needs protein and lots of leave-in. Kaleb’s hair can handle a ton of products and I usually layer on a ton of leave-in, followed by a moisturizing oil, like Jamaican castor oil or almond oil.

The post Hair Transformation: I am a Curly Girl, Are You? appeared first on MidKid Mama.