Monday Must-Haves | Curl Keeper
A good hairspray is an important tool to have in your beauty arsenal. I have a lot of very fine hair so curling it + keeping it curled is borderline impossible. That’s why it only gets curled for special occasions. In the last year I curled my hair for my Ginger Spice + nerd halloween costumes, a St. Paddy’s Day bar crawl + for a wedding in May. It was also curled for my photoshoot last month, but the girl who styled me didn’t quite understand how much hairspray I’d need. By the time I’d gotten to outfit two, I was down to a few face-framing tendrils. It wasn’t cute.
According to my mom, my hair used to be curly up until my first haircut. It then became straight as a stick + by junior high I earned this weird wave. The first time mom tried to curl my hair I was four + standing up in my cousins’ wedding. We tried hairspray. We tried gel. We tried mousse. We tried combinations + all three. Within half an hour, my hair was back to stick straight. If it was long enough, I could have worn it in two braids + been the strawberry blonde version of Molly the American Girl. That’s how seriously straight it was.
I remember once in junior high or early high school buying John Frieda’s Dream Curl from his Frizz-Ease line sure that because it worked for my friend Katie’s hair that it would work for me. Spoiler alert, it did not. What I failed to realize is that Katie had these beautiful, almost pin-up-y waves that easily lent themselves to being manipulated into curls. Now that I have some weird wave in my hair, you’d think it’d be easier. It’s not.
The first time I curled my hair myself was for our church pictures freshman year of high school. I’d love to share this hilariously awkward photo of me but it seems I removed it from my MySpace + with good reason. So I’ll do my best to describe it for you. I
was wearing a cranberry collared v-neck with three quarter length sleeves from American Eagle with the essential white cami underneath. It was a church photo for goodness sake! I’d curled
my natural strawberry blonde hair with a very small curling iron using the clamp because I was not trying to burn myself. Actually I don’t think curling wands were even a thing yet + even so, I’m terrified to use them. Of course I was wearing jewelry, large thin silver hoops + a small blue flip flop necklace. It was 2005. Makeup was minimal compared to now: a very pale foundation, nothing done to my poor eyebrows, purple eye shadow, eye liner but only on my lower waterline, mascara + clear lip gloss. You would not catch me in lip gloss now. So sticky. I’m all about the liquid lipstick IF it dries. But getting it curled for that thirty minute time slot was hell. I’m sure I just used whatever hairspray mom had in her bathroom + called it a night. The curls didn’t look the same at the beginning as they did at the end. It was so frustrating.
After that fiasco, I think my hair was curled four more times in high school, sophomore homecoming, junior homecoming, senior prom + graduation, but those times I left it to the professionals. It just wasn’t worth my time + energy when the curls simply wouldn’t stay. When I went away to college, I insisted to my mother that I needed a curling iron. So as we wandered the aisles of Target putting everything one might remotely need in my cart, I also tossed a $20 curling iron in as well. I also tossed a can of my now absolute favorite hairspray into the cart. I didn’t know a thing about it, but I appreciated its clever name + how big the can was. “Surely this’ll do,” I thought.
xo.
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