I'm wondering if I'm the only one! Hair type

[brok3nwings]

Ok so i always thought my hair was a bit wierd conserning if its straight or wavy. The truth is my hair is completly straight at the top and completly wavy at the bottom... i find this wierd but i dont know if it is,it has been like this for a long long time... i mean, i dont just have some wavyness in the bottom, it really is WAVY, and the top..is no way near from wavy. i look at my hair from the back and i see the straight ones "fighting" with the wavy ones... if i use a half updo everyone would say i have wavy hair, if i use everything loose... its just ... confusing ... lol
i always knew this but i cut a bit of my longest layer this week so it gives the ilusion that the straight ones are longer...i can notice them a lot more... and the wavy hair days will be more difficult for me now :p
Anyone has this type of hair?

[Katze]

yep. Every. Single. Day.

Unless I have just washed, used no conditioner, and put a bunch of aloe in it...but over the week, the top flattens out into straight-but-frizzy, and the bottom curls into S shaped waves. If I have had my hair the "wrong way" this combination can look very unattractive. Sometimes updos ruin it, sometimes (like today) NOT sleeping with it up has given me half-flat, half-poofy hair, that I then "have to" wear up - but don't feel like taking the time to struggle to put it into an acceptable looking hairdo.

What you describe is the reality of our hair type. It is some days one thing, some days something else.

You can wash more to get more body at the roots, and scrunch, use pin curls or bendy foam rollers or braid waves, hair gel or aloe vera gel, to get waves that stay. There are many, many tricks to get hair wavier...and a few to get hair straighter, if that's what you want (I don't!).

However, for me, this is too much work on a daily basis, so I either wash my hair more so I can enjoy it down, or try to put it up and be OK with it. My hair lays in a pattern that does not look good up; its natural state is to want to be down. If I oil it, brush it, oil it again, mist it, oil it, and regularly comb it, I can get *dirty* hair (day 3 onwards) to lay sort-of flat. Sort of. The ends still wave, but tend to be stringy. They are thin, and look even thinner then.

I fight every day with my hair. I wish it looked like other peoples' - even my sister's hair hangs in a smooth curtain, and looks good taken down after she's had it up. (see pic in album - that was a "good" hair day for me - sister's hair looks like that Every Day). Mine gets poofy, wiry, frizzy, or parts on the scalp in weird ways. That is just what I was born with.

Honestly I am really hoping my baby (boy or girl, but especially for a girl) inherits its dad's hair, and not mine. I am happy with my natural color and the amount of wave, but I am not happy with the in-between, frizzy-straight, sometimes-poofy unmanageability of it.

[Sarahmoon]

I don't your hair type, just wanted to say I think it looks really good in your signature picture. Nice colour and very shiny!

[NightDaemon]

My hair does that too, straight then wavy... It only started having the straight bit when I went long, I'd always figured that the extra weight was pulling it straight...

[Marie99]

Me too. I think the weight of the hair pulls the top straight, and the ends go wild. A little oil might control the fly away frizzy part. You have to experiment to find an oil good for you. From browsing the board, I can see people have wildly different reactions to different oils. I likc cheap coconut oil from WalMart, but that doesn't mean you will.

[FrannyG]

Your hair looks like 1c or 2a to me, after looking at a few of your photos. I'm leaning toward 1c, but that's just me. It's very common to see 2a's with hair close to the scalp until it's free at the nape. There's nothing unusual about that at all.

[brok3nwings]

well this thread reminded me of something i wanted to ask about...why do people with wavy, curly hair tend to deal more with frizz?? i actually think i dont have that problem at all... could it me the fact that my hair is M and not F ?Any one knows this?

[lora410]

Same here. I never figured out why. Even when my hair was short the top was always stick straight :lol:

[Chromis]

Mine is the same way. I personally rather like it.

[Periwinkle]

If you wash your hair and then don't tie it back (just leave it down), is it still like that at the top?

My hair holds a shape incredibly well (if I twirl it round my finger, I'll have a curl there after a minute) and even the slightest bit of pull on the top part (like when tying it back) makes it go perfectly straight, but if I leave it alone while drying, it's wavier up there. Not as wavy as the rest (probably because there's my head in the way and the weight of the hair, plus no flicky ends), but definitely wavy.

[Anje]

My hair is often like that -- straight on top, loose waves further down.

I think part of the waviness might be coming from your length. Your hair is still at the point where it likes to sit on your shoulders (at least, that's what I see from the pictures). When it gets a little longer and can hang more freely away from your shoulders, there might not be as much discrepancy between head hair and length hair.

[hobbitgirl]

My hair is pretty curly, but as it gets longer it pulls the curls out of the top near the roots and it lays flatter. I also have 1 lock of pin straight hair growing at nape of my neck that naturally hangs longer than the rest of the hair on my head.

[Leabhar]

My hair holds waves better now that I've gone off cones, and I kind of like the look (damp bun, bun curls!). If the split frustrates you, trust me, it looks better long than short, and the quickest way to get it long is to grow it and not straighten the curls or curl the straight bits with heat.

If you wanted to curl the straight top, you could do rollers on damp hair, or rag curls, and if you wanted to straighten the bottom for a while, big rollers or hair wrapping.

[heeylaa]

From your question and the responses I'm getting mixed signals, is it that the top is straight and the length is wavy; or the canopy is straight and the underlayers are wavy? I've seen this happen in either case, and I think both are normal. My canopy has s-waves that get deeper through the layers till my nape where they coil up into 3a curls.

[dor3girl]

My daughter has the same hair you described. Hers is pretty much pin straight from the top of her head down to her ears. Below the ears it's pretty wavy & curlier on one side. When I cut her hair, I have to lightly layer her hair, so that when it's dry, it looks like one length. (The underneath always wants to go into dread locks--egad!)

[brok3nwings]

Periwinckle my hair also helds pretty well everything i do with it..its easy to get it straight, easy to get it wavy...and im sure if i wanted curls i would get them. But about your question my hair does that even just washing and letting it airdry. Its not because of the weight, even with really short hair i would get straight hair at the top and wavy at the bottom, and i´ve had long hair once and its the same thing! :)
lora410 i kind of find it funny dont you?
Katze you have beautiful hair, dont fight with it that much, let it be! normally thats the best thing to do with unbehaved hair :P I actually didnt know it was a caracteristic of 2a, probably just only for some of us ;)
Ange my hair is a bit longer then shoulder lenght and it was almost at BSL before i cut it..and its not because it stands on my sholders, its something my hair does since forever, even long...i just dont remember any of my friends having this
hobbitgirl i find that type of hair really pretty...i actually like it a bit more then curls that come from the scalp
Leabhar i actually like it, its only a bit difficult to know whats the best cut style ..
heeylaa that seams pretty awsume. I love that kind of mix ;) but what i was saying is that the underlayers are wavy all the way down..and the top is straight also all the way down! :)
dor3girl I dont think that is my type but it is also a "kind of wavy"...it seams there are many ihihi but yes i also have trouble finding the best way to cut my hair... if i get a completly blunt hair the wavy hairs only gets seen with a halfupdo

[Arctic_Mama]

It's a common problem with loosely wavy hair. And to complicate it, if your hair is treated at all - even hennaed - it can mask your true hair type. I find that if I wash my hair and don't comb, don't even FINGER comb beyond the water spray, and sit up while it dries it curls loosely all the way up to the crown, and when I was training it to be curly I could get loose ringlets with a lot of care. Thus, a 2a-2b curly even though it is straight with only two or three body waves right now, four days after my last wash. Hair typing can be VERY tricky especially if you don't regularly mess with anyone's hair but your own. I find a good hairdresser is the best to get a 'feel' of hairtype from. I used to think my hair was quite course, actually, since it was a frizzy mess and SO BIG... but lo and behold my hairdresser noted that my hair was actually more fine than 90% of her clients and among the thickest heads she'd seen. She said that it was my wave type that made it seem much more course than it actually was. And I didn't know better because I only had myself and my family's hair to compare to. Even pictures make it hard to tell, sometimes.

Wavy hair is normally quite flat on the crown and even down to the ears, then poofs out from there. It's also normal to have lots of crown frizz right after a wash, even if you don't have a lot of breakage. But the better you treat your hair the less 'issues' you'll have with it, I promise!