Coloring Curly Hair

Curly Hair Coloring FAQ

I wrote about Curly Hair yesterday, and in that post said I had other horror stories to share, and here is one series of oddities I faced.

I was reminded of this all from reading the article I have linked above, about coloring curly hair, and how it’s different and needs to be considered first.

When I was a teen I didn’t like my hair color. It had naturally darkened considerably from the very nice blonde I was as a child. It was what I would have called, then, mousy blah brown. Nondescript, not really brown nor not. Just mousy nothing hair.

My hair was also curly-incongnito at that time. Having no clue that I should approach hair coloring differently, I saw a new Clairol product in the mail and got some of it at the store. I followed the directions to get lighter prettier hair, and ended up with:

A halo of horrifing bozo hair.

It was terribly dry, and ruined and ugly and the color was intensely orange-like and I was very upset.

My eldest sister was there visiting from out of state, and so with her we got a “fix” … a box of something light ASH brown.

It literally calmed my hair down to a lovely color, and the texture was smoother and it looked “fixed”.

That hair fiasco ended alright, but it was torture to see it happen. To have a clown head for a day and think all was over was nearly too much for me to handle.

What happened, I think, is that my hair, being curly but not accepting it so much then, went bazookas over the lightening agents and the color was stripped down to the last vestige of what was in that hair shaft.

What was there was a harkening to the future too, for my hair went through changes and came out “reddish” later on.

I’ve had hair since then that gets redder on top from exposure to elements, and some strands go to blondish with time, if it’s long, as it is now. The best hair is the underlayer, it’s thick and dark and curlier and a deep red brown at the back of my head, like by my neck. My upper layers aren’t so nice, being botticelli haired, that’s normal. The top weighs down the lower, and so it’s finding lift for the top layer that makes us botticelli’s happier headed.

So then from that coloring experience, I learned that ASH is what I liked, and it interacted to tone down harsh orange trends. I used that tactic later to color my hair darker to get it to look more like my underlayers of nice hair. It worked, but prices to pay in the future weren’t so great. It means doing it again and again.

Curly hair doesn’t hold color the same way straight hair does. So eventually I graduated to not doing it really much, and then using “temporary” things like Natural Instincts, sometimes. A few years ago I totally stopped trying to fool with my natural color and it’s just as it is, multicolored with an overall appearance of a brown/red that shows more red in natural sunlight. It’s brown the gleams red as if it was encased in some gelleous red stuff, sort of. It’s alive color, not dead flat color.

In high school I got my hair cut in layered styles sometimes. People would think I only colored my hair. “You colored your hair brown. Why?” would be the questions. They didn’t notice the new hair style, just the absence of that upper weighty layer of hair.

One time in my late teens a hair coloring I had was a light brown, and I was in Southern CA with a sister after that, way after it would have “worn off” … and my hair got lighter and lighter and lighter … I had it cut into a short layered “almost boy” cut … and I had pretty blonde hair, no red in sight. Weird. My hair faded out … to real blonde, all on it’s own after a tradional coloring some months before. THAT was what I was seeking that other time when I fried my hair instead somehow, and believe me I followed directions. It wasn’t peroxide, but sure looked bad like that would be if I had peroxided myself on purpose, I think.

I’ve come a long way … I accept my hair as it is. I believe in teaching all people to do so. I don’t mean to sound critical of hair coloring, many do it for a variety of reasons. It’s just that if people knew how to care for their type of hair and style it appropriately for their being, changing colors wouldn’t matter as much to some or most. God made us a certain way and we can live with that. 🙂

I’ll never know what would have happened to my hair if I hadn’t fooled with it trying to change it’s color that first time. Maybe it’d still have gotten to be a pretty brown/red eventually, but for that time, it was mousy blah ugly. I had no mother that helped me with looks and such, so I was on my own in decision making for such thing. It’s quite different for my children, I’m their Mama, and I style their hair and choose their clothing at the store. It’s shaping them, I let them understand hair and clothing. It’ll help them as they grow up. Children do not need to make the same mistakes as their parents made. That’s applicable to so many areas of life, and one of them is “hair” what kind do you have, what looks right on you, and this is what is best to do with it. It’s being pro-active, not just “doing just because …” but having purpose in understanding how it works.

My youngest son is 4 and he has wavy hair in the back, actually his front hair, like what you’d call “bangs” and the area just next to it on each side, that’s straightish, and the rest is wavier. His hair is always disheveled looking unless it was JUST washed and dried and combed. I hadn’t understood that his hair was “curly” until one day I suddenly realized it while writing a post to an email list about “curly hair” and the signs that you really are curly even if you don’t think so.

So I treat his hair with conditioner and use gel now and then. Never comb it when it’s dry. Finger unsnarl knots, and scrunch and treat it as curly hair when it’s just washed. He gets no shampoo anymore, just that conditioner wash, and an occassional California Baby shampoo (which is so very gentle and great for light wavy hair, or straight hair too! Smells SO VERY GOOD!)

He needs a “wet down” before we go anywhere, to unfurl the waves and bring them out. I’ve let it grow longer in the back, he has lazy waves, need to be longer to show themselve properly. This is problematic in a boy. I don’t believe boys have to have short hair. But that’s hard to practice in a land that thinks girls can have short hair, but boys can ONLY have short hair.

My boys both have longer hair, above their shoulders, but over the ears, falling back as it can for boys so nicely.

My youngest gets a fuzzy wool-like head in the back, so he is in need of that conditioner wet down daily, or at least wet down. He’s messy looking, it’s just what wavy is, light curl … dissheveled appeal. 🙂