So…I’m going to write a blog about, of all things, my hair.
I know. This seems sort of crazy.
Number one, because I really only know how to make wavy, frizzy hair straight. That’s it. That’s all I can do. I can make a rudimentary braid and put it in a ponytail. Nothing in the least little bit special.
And number two, because that seems way out on a limb away from my normal blog posts.
I mean, really, I doubt too terrible many people care. BUT. I have had more than one person inquire about how I manage to get my frizzy hair to calm the heck down, and a couple of people have told me that they think it would make an interesting blog post. And so, I oblige.
Like everything in this world of mine, my hair revolves around my divorce. Pre-divorce, my method of dealing with my hair was basically to wash it and brush it and be sad that it didn’t look like I envisioned in my mind. An excellent question at this juncture would be-why on earth would you assume, having lived with wavy, frizzy hair since the age of 14, that suddenly said hair would simply straighten itself and turn into the style that you like? There’s no really simple answer to that other than-I didn’t know how to deal with my hair. I didn’t know a lot of things pre-divorce. I didn’t know how to deal with talking to people I didn’t know, I didn’t know how to plot out a budget and stick to it, and I didn’t know how to tame this wild mass of hair that God saw fit to put on my head.
Then I lived through my life falling all apart. My life fell to such bits that I basically had to start from the beginning and figure out who I was again. That, in all honesty, is how much to the bone I defined myself as Nick Johnson’s wife. And if I wasn’t Nick Johnson’s wife anymore, then who was I? It seems crazy, but really, so does nearly everything about my life in the past three years.
Looking back, I’m pretty sure that putting myself back together again started with my hair because it was something that I truly struggled with, something that I desperately wanted to control but felt at a loss as to what to do. My whole life might have been shattered at my feet, and everything felt beyond my control-and so I grabbed onto this hair and insisted that it bend to my will.
So, the nitty-gritty of how exactly I do this. My hair is naturally very thick and it has a wave to it. Not exactly a curl, though my hair will easily hold a curl if I want it to. The issue, of course, being that I wanted it to lay straight.
I accomplish this mostly through my flat iron. I have 2 that I use consistently. One flat iron is an Ion Keratin Smoothing Flat Iron. This iron is skinny, but it gets hot (it can go up to 450, I use it at 400). Basically, once my hair is totally dry after I wash it (I wash my hair twice a week, on Sunday and Wednesday), I use this flat iron in very small sections all around my head. The smaller the sections, the easier it is to get it to all lay flat. It takes about 15 minutes.
My other flat iron is a Remington. It is much wider and easier to use. I use it always the day after I wash my hair, to get my hair to behave itself, and then in the mornings just after I comb my hair if I think that it needs it-obviously, frizzy hair is more of a problem the more humid it is.
The only other real secrets keeping my hair straight lie in my shampoo and conditioner (I use Brazilian Keratin Therapy shampoo and conditioner) and my blow-dry spray (which is called WOW-this is a miraculous product that I would chose to take to a deserted island). I use a wide toothed comb to keep my hair from breaking. And that’s that.
The whole entire thing-from washing my hair to drying and straightening it-takes one hour tops. And much of that is just that it takes a while to dry my hair because it’s so thick.
Like I said, I’m not exactly a beauty blogger, nor do I especially know what I’m doing. I have learned things mostly by asking people whose hair I like what products they use, and by having a hair stylist that I adore.
Prior to my divorce, I defined myself as a girl who didn’t care about hair or makeup or clothes. But deep down, I really did care about those things-I just didn’t know how to go about figuring any of it out. I think that falling apart in front of truly every person I have ever met made me realize that not one single person thought I had it together. So we shattered that illusion, and it opened me up to realizing that I could, if I wanted to, just become this completely new person.
Silly as it sounds, that began with a hair straightener.
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