Fiddle-dee-dee!

Not quite two years ago I discovered the Curly Girl Method. No, it’s not a religion or a diet and it doesn’t involve selling cleaning products door to door. In short, it’s a way of taking care of your hair, for anyone – no matter their ethnicity, black or white, male or female, young or old – who has anything from a slight wave to tight coils. Here’s where it started with stylist Lorraine Massey. Nikki Walton, aka Curly Nikki is another well-known advocate.

There’s scads of information online for further reading, but the basics are: stop washing hair with sulfate-based shampoos (they create suds and strip hair of moisture which wavy/curly hair in particular needs), condition the hell out of hair, use gel, and ideally air dry.

My hair always had a wave and held curl well if I used regular or hot rollers. I liked that and had no interest in flat-ironed stick-straight hair (which magazines, Hollywood, etc., have touted for years).

There are different kinds of curly hair and I believe from my own research, that I’ve got a fickle kind (oh, that’s not the official name), meaning it’s unpredictable. It can’t be counted on to do the same thing two days in a row and further, did you know one person could have different kinds of curls on their one personal head? I know it now. Still, applying the basics of the care outlined above have made considerable improvements and brought out waves and curls heretofore unseen. I’m sold.

The thing which has most captivated me is the emergence of my one and only Scarlett O’Hara spiral curl. It resides alone on the left side of my head, beneath other hair (which is doing a variety of things, just not spiraling). I’ve never seen this before. Why is it the only one?? Why didn’t I get a batch of ’em? It comes and goes like the Cheshire cat, but here it is, with the rest of the gang pinned up out of view, on a recent day.

Fiddle-dee-dee indeed!