Regardless of the slight uneasiness, I attempted to reassure myself as I sat down within the salon chair, regarded round, and noticed how completely different my texture was from the opposite shoppers. These stylists have been curly-hair specialists! I used to be in good arms! I’ve reported on curly cuts earlier than; I knew they might be transformative. After six years of sporting my hair pure, I used to be trying ahead to seeing these outcomes.
I bought a normal shampoo session, then was positioned underneath a hooded dryer to let the deep conditioner penetrate (and, after all, to let my hair dry) earlier than any scissors got here close to my head. As soon as the stylist started reducing every curl—and I do imply every particular person curl, separately—my preliminary thought was, Wow, that is going to take ceaselessly. Thus started my first gripe with curly cuts: “A curly lower can take about an hour and a half to 2 hours, which incorporates the wash-and-go styling after the lower,” says New York Metropolis-based hairstylist Karen Miller, who makes a speciality of styling and reducing textured hair, each curly and stretched, and works with stars together with Quinta Brunson and Solange. “A typical haircut on blown-out textured hair takes about an hour.”
Most curly-cut appointments will finish with a pure coiffure like a twist-out, a braid-out, or, mostly, a wash-and-go. (Now that you just’ve enhanced your curls with the lower, it’s time to indicate them off, proper?!) Regardless of my protest that wash-and-gos all the time depart me with a shrunken-up, stiff Afro, the stylists insisted it was one of the best styling methodology for my texture. In order that they coated my hair in copious quantities of gel and mousse earlier than diffusing it. As I predicted, I used to be left with a shrunk-up Afro. Now, there’s nothing fallacious with a TWA, but it surely’s not what I used to be used to nor what I felt I signed up for. The form of my curls regarded spiky and as I went to shake my hair, anticipating some motion, like the ladies I noticed on TikTok, I bought nothing. My curls have been stiff.
Did I mismanage my expectations? Perhaps. However within the following days, I turned satisfied that my hair wasn’t meant for curly cuts. The subsequent morning, my curls have been dry and coiled along with no bounce or motion. White flakes of gel residue floated down from my hair each time I moved my head ever so barely.