Why so many curly haired people have spent a lifetime having disappointing haircuts.
There’s a conversation I have in my salon almost every day.
A new client arrives, sits down and begins telling me the sorry tale of their hair.
The disastrous haircuts. The endless products. The hours spent wrestling with a diffuser. The hairdresser who assured them they knew exactly how to cut curls, before proceeding to straighten the life out of them.
And then, almost inevitably, come the words:
“My hair is just really difficult.”
And I want to shout, NO IT ISN’T!
Well, not at them, obviously. That would be a rather alarming start to an appointment.
But it does make me wonder how we’ve managed to convince so many people that the hair growing naturally out of their heads is somehow defective.
The haircut that looked lovely. Until you washed it.
We’ve all been there.
You leave the hairdresser with a fabulous blow dry, swishing your hair around like you’re in a shampoo advert.
Three days later, you wash it yourself.
And there it is. The familiar triangular silhouette. The frizz. The mysterious bits sticking out at peculiar angles.
You wonder what you’ve done wrong.
Probably nothing.
The problem is that curly hair has often been approached as though it’s straight hair with a bit of an attitude problem.
It’s combed out, pulled taut, cut into neat lines and expected to behave itself.
Except curls don’t behave like that.
They shrink. They spring. They twist. They do entirely different things depending on which part of your head they’re growing from.
And if you don’t understand how they work, you can end up with a haircut that looks lovely when someone else styles it and rather less lovely when left to its own devices.
And who exactly was supposed to teach us?
This is the bit that really gets me.
Who taught you how to look after your hair?
Was it your mum, who perhaps had completely different hair from yours?
A hairdresser who spent ten minutes telling you to use a serum and a round brush?
Or an enthusiastic stranger on Instagram who insists you need nine products, a Denman brush, a silk bonnet, a diffuser and the patience of a Buddhist monk?
It’s hardly surprising that people are confused.
We’re expected to know how to manage our curls, but very few of us have ever been properly shown.
Instead, we’ve spent years experimenting, buying things that don’t work and quietly concluding that our hair is the problem.
It’s a rather ridiculous state of affairs.
The curly hair industry has a lot to answer for
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love curly hair products. I use them every day.
But somewhere along the way, looking after curly hair has become unnecessarily complicated.
There are rules about what you can wash it with, what you mustn’t wash it with, how often you should touch it, when you should brush it, which direction you should scrunch it and goodness knows what else.
Honestly, it’s exhausting just thinking about it.
And then there are the products.
Creams, custards, gels, mousses, foams, oils, sprays, treatments and potions promising to transform your hair into something resembling a glossy advertisement.
Before you know it, you’ve spent £150 and still haven’t got a clue what to do on wash day.
Here’s a radical thought. What if we actually taught people how to look after their hair instead?
A haircut is only half the story
When I travelled to New York to train with Lorraine Massey, the creator of the Curly Girl Method, it fundamentally changed the way I approached hairdressing.
I learnt to work with curls rather than against them, cutting each curl individually and respecting the way the hair naturally falls.
But here’s the thing.
A beautiful haircut is only half the story.
Because there’s absolutely no point in me spending time creating a lovely shape if you go home, wash your hair and end up looking like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.
This is why education is such a huge part of my Curl Transformation appointments.
We don’t just cut your hair.
We explore it.
I’ll show you how to cleanse and condition your curls, how to apply styling products, how to dry your hair and how to make the whole thing work for you.
And, perhaps most importantly, I’ll explain why.
Because once you understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, everything becomes so much easier.
You can ask me anything.
Why does my hair go frizzy? Should I brush it? Why does one side curl beautifully while the other looks like it’s given up on life? Do I really need all these products?
Spoiler alert: probably not.
I don’t want you to leave my salon with a beautiful hairstyle and absolutely no idea how it happened.
I want you to leave knowing how to do it yourself.
In fact, my aim is to make myself less necessary, not more.
Not a particularly clever business model, perhaps, but I can live with that.
Your curls don’t need taming
There’s another expression I’d quite happily see disappear from the hairdressing vocabulary.
Taming unruly hair.
Why are we still talking about curls as though they’re badly behaved children?
They’re not unruly. They’re curly.
They have texture, movement, personality and sometimes a rather spectacular amount of volume.
And no, they’re not always going to look exactly the same every day.
Neither do we.
I think there’s something rather liberating about accepting that.
I’m not interested in forcing your hair to conform to somebody else’s idea of what beautiful hair should look like.
I’m interested in helping you discover what your own hair can do.
So perhaps your hair isn’t the problem after all
If you’ve spent years having disappointing haircuts, battling frizz, straightening your hair into submission or wondering why everyone else seems to have mastered their curls except you, I’d like you to consider something.
Maybe you’ve never actually been given the right haircut.
And maybe nobody has ever taken the time to teach you how to look after your hair.
That’s not a personal failing. It’s a rather enormous gap in the way we’ve traditionally approached curly hair.
And it’s exactly why I do what I do.
My little salon is in Wivenhoe, just outside Colchester in Essex, and I specialise exclusively in curly and wavy hair.
You don’t need to know your curl type. You don’t need a complicated routine. And you certainly don’t need to arrive with beautifully defined curls.
Just come as you are.
I’ll take it from there.
Anna x