murkypon
August 25th, 2012, 08:47 PM
Moving this post from the new forum under advisement of one of your members. Sorry if you've already seen it!
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A foreword: I wrote a lot here to give background in the hopes I would get better advice because of it. If you don't feel like reading it all, just take a look at the part from the photo on, please. I'm just desperate.
So... I have recently been lurking your forums a great deal. And, while doing so, I stumbled across the visual hair typing guide, which brought me to a startling revelation--I had NO idea what my natural hair looked like. Not just color--we're talking texture, thickness, etc. What I thought I had was baby fine, brownish, thin (due to lots of breakage), slightly wavy hair.
Why don't I know what I have? Well, I have had a hate-hate relationship with my hair for most of my life. I permed and highlighted repeatedly from ages 9-16, which is when I found my first grey hair. Since then, I've had various dyes--graduating from heavy highlights to all-over color. For about 4 years, I was having my hair done on a Navy base and the colorists apparently didn't know what they were doing. The result was that my hair turned black, which was not becoming on my very fair, pinkish complexion. To fix, about a year ago, a colorist entirely stripped my hair and redyed it red. Then he apparently lost interest in it over the year as he has been doing some very odd things to my roots as of late. Add to this, the fact that I have used all sorts of products on my hair my whole life, usually applied while it's wet, and you may understand a little more about the torture it has gone through and the reason why I have no clue what it looks like.
In any case, when I signed up and had to fill in the questions about hair type, I decided to do the shampoo-condition-air dry with no touching and products thing to find out what my hair actually looked like in its natural state. The result was sobering and has made me almost desperate.
First, it oddly began forming almost spiral-like curls. That was very surprising to me. They were very rough to the touch, but very light. I did not touch it for hours, but 5 hours later it still wasn't entirely dry. It was close, but still sort of damp. This surprised me, since my hair is quite fine and I only have a 1.5 inch ponytail circumference at the thickest point. So, since I had to leave the house, and the curls, while not gorgeous, were acceptable to me, I went out.
Fast forward to 2 hours later. I return and look in the mirror. The bottom layers stretched into wavy snaky-looking rat tails. And the top layer poofed into a cotton candy-like cloud of frizz. Photo:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9...i3ugo1_500.jpg
Be aware of two things:
1) I had gently patted the poofy cloud of frizz down in this photo, but it's about ready to rear up again at the slightest breeze that passes by.
2) Yes, that is the way my roots look at the moment. Grey/brown in the middle, an odd red that my colorist seems to have decided looks good at the moment, but which doesn't match the rest of my hair, and then the darker red-brown which looks slightly greenish against the odd red.
3) The snaky tails coming out of my hair and the frizz were once spiral curls before any sort of air flow touched the hair. And all it took to get to this point was air moving past my hair. Not wind. Not a high-speed fan. Just the gentle air that sort of moves by you as you walk across the floor.
So that, I think, is all the background you need to answer the following:
1) How do I even start with hair typing? The strands are fine (or used to be when they were healthy) and are still very small, but they're quite rough when I touch them in their natural state. They certainly don't "feel like a strand of silk", but they ARE that small. My hair floats on the top of a glass of water, which should (from what I've read) indicate that it's not porous, but it took over 5 hours for it to dry. It gets really curly, but then they fall out so easily or poof... so is this curly hair, wavy hair, what? And the ponytail is about 1.5 inches at the top with lots of little baby broken hairs everywhere, but by the time you get halfway down my ponytail, it's maybe 0.25 inches. I'd love to try some recommendations, but I have no idea where to even start with the whole concept of a hair twin, or recommendations based on hair type.
2) I know I need to stop using products. I need to stop coloring. I need to stop chemically treating my hair. I need to stay away from silicones. I'm resigned to the fact that I will likely be having a number of really bad hair days from now on. But... is there anything to keep those days from being quite so bad? In general, I'd like to still cover my grays. I'm in my thirties and I get mistaken for a 20-year old regularly based on skin, but I got my first grey at 17. And though I had always planned to age gracefully, I wasn't ready to do that so young, and I'm still not ready to. Is there anything to do to tame the frizz and the general scariness without frying and/or smothering it again?
And... yeah. I'll leave you alone now. Sorry for the novel. I think I'm just so shocked from the hair typing experiment that I'm not sure how to reign it in right now.
Any and all advice/comments is very, very welcome.
------------------------
A foreword: I wrote a lot here to give background in the hopes I would get better advice because of it. If you don't feel like reading it all, just take a look at the part from the photo on, please. I'm just desperate.
So... I have recently been lurking your forums a great deal. And, while doing so, I stumbled across the visual hair typing guide, which brought me to a startling revelation--I had NO idea what my natural hair looked like. Not just color--we're talking texture, thickness, etc. What I thought I had was baby fine, brownish, thin (due to lots of breakage), slightly wavy hair.
Why don't I know what I have? Well, I have had a hate-hate relationship with my hair for most of my life. I permed and highlighted repeatedly from ages 9-16, which is when I found my first grey hair. Since then, I've had various dyes--graduating from heavy highlights to all-over color. For about 4 years, I was having my hair done on a Navy base and the colorists apparently didn't know what they were doing. The result was that my hair turned black, which was not becoming on my very fair, pinkish complexion. To fix, about a year ago, a colorist entirely stripped my hair and redyed it red. Then he apparently lost interest in it over the year as he has been doing some very odd things to my roots as of late. Add to this, the fact that I have used all sorts of products on my hair my whole life, usually applied while it's wet, and you may understand a little more about the torture it has gone through and the reason why I have no clue what it looks like.
In any case, when I signed up and had to fill in the questions about hair type, I decided to do the shampoo-condition-air dry with no touching and products thing to find out what my hair actually looked like in its natural state. The result was sobering and has made me almost desperate.
First, it oddly began forming almost spiral-like curls. That was very surprising to me. They were very rough to the touch, but very light. I did not touch it for hours, but 5 hours later it still wasn't entirely dry. It was close, but still sort of damp. This surprised me, since my hair is quite fine and I only have a 1.5 inch ponytail circumference at the thickest point. So, since I had to leave the house, and the curls, while not gorgeous, were acceptable to me, I went out.
Fast forward to 2 hours later. I return and look in the mirror. The bottom layers stretched into wavy snaky-looking rat tails. And the top layer poofed into a cotton candy-like cloud of frizz. Photo:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9...i3ugo1_500.jpg
Be aware of two things:
1) I had gently patted the poofy cloud of frizz down in this photo, but it's about ready to rear up again at the slightest breeze that passes by.
2) Yes, that is the way my roots look at the moment. Grey/brown in the middle, an odd red that my colorist seems to have decided looks good at the moment, but which doesn't match the rest of my hair, and then the darker red-brown which looks slightly greenish against the odd red.
3) The snaky tails coming out of my hair and the frizz were once spiral curls before any sort of air flow touched the hair. And all it took to get to this point was air moving past my hair. Not wind. Not a high-speed fan. Just the gentle air that sort of moves by you as you walk across the floor.
So that, I think, is all the background you need to answer the following:
1) How do I even start with hair typing? The strands are fine (or used to be when they were healthy) and are still very small, but they're quite rough when I touch them in their natural state. They certainly don't "feel like a strand of silk", but they ARE that small. My hair floats on the top of a glass of water, which should (from what I've read) indicate that it's not porous, but it took over 5 hours for it to dry. It gets really curly, but then they fall out so easily or poof... so is this curly hair, wavy hair, what? And the ponytail is about 1.5 inches at the top with lots of little baby broken hairs everywhere, but by the time you get halfway down my ponytail, it's maybe 0.25 inches. I'd love to try some recommendations, but I have no idea where to even start with the whole concept of a hair twin, or recommendations based on hair type.
2) I know I need to stop using products. I need to stop coloring. I need to stop chemically treating my hair. I need to stay away from silicones. I'm resigned to the fact that I will likely be having a number of really bad hair days from now on. But... is there anything to keep those days from being quite so bad? In general, I'd like to still cover my grays. I'm in my thirties and I get mistaken for a 20-year old regularly based on skin, but I got my first grey at 17. And though I had always planned to age gracefully, I wasn't ready to do that so young, and I'm still not ready to. Is there anything to do to tame the frizz and the general scariness without frying and/or smothering it again?
And... yeah. I'll leave you alone now. Sorry for the novel. I think I'm just so shocked from the hair typing experiment that I'm not sure how to reign it in right now.
Any and all advice/comments is very, very welcome.