Parting is such sweet sorrow

I am one of those girls who has never really coveted other peoples hair, though I by no means have always loved mine. I mean you normally here women saying they want curls instead of straight hair, or straight hair instead of curls, and brunets want to be blonds and so on and so forth. I have never really wished for different hair for more than a day. Straight hair is nice to visit but I don't want to get rid of my curls.

When I was younger my hair was ridiculously thick and annoyingly frizzy. The latter came from the fact that I had neither the knowledge nor inclination to take care of my massive mane of curls.  As I got older my hair started to resemble my mothers hair; baby fine and thinning. That wasn't exactly the trait I was hoping to get from my mother.

Curls are a pain to take care of. Seriously the number of rules for curly hair are just stupid. You have to pay attention to length, and avoid layers, and avoid brushes and combs, and you have to use product, and cold water is better than hot, and too much heat does bad things, and too much moisture does worse things, and you have to volumize your roots without weighing down your ends.

Then there is the general annoyance of the curls getting caught in everything. Your head is practically velcro. When I could wear earrings I never wore anything dangly or complicated as my hair would inevitably eat them. Fuzz is constantly getting stuck in the ringlets as well as any number of other things like leaves, string, and crumbs*.

Still for all the trouble it is I adore my hair. I love having all these curls, and honestly so does everyone else. I hear more people talking about coveting my ringlets than you would believe. I know they would hate them if they had to suddenly try and tame them, but they will probably never know what trouble they really are.

Recently I have been making an effort to love my curls more. I am a low maintenance sort of girl. If I could be no maintenance I so would be, but I am not sure anyone who wants to be socially acceptable can be no maintenance. As it is things like makeup and actual hair styling are reserved for special occasions only. I am told I can get away with this and I will continue to believe it is true because I have those sorts of friends.**

Part of loving my curls though means more maintenance. As I mentioned before I am already restricted in how I care for my hair in measures of water temperature, combing, drying, and types of product. This has not changed, I have simply added product and changed some procedures. Where I would normally towel dry my hair I now just ring it out and sort of blot the ends to keep from dripping. Where I used to just use a leave in conditioner or BioSilk and some curl defining spray, I have now added in a curl volumizer.

My routine now involves me standing with my head turned upside down as I scrunch my hair up with goo covered hands. The husbeast came in for a goodbye kiss this morning and I had to deny him because I was right in the middle of applying the product and didn't want to get it on him or mess up my curls.

The other actual change is that I have stopped parting my hair. I can't remember a time when I didn't part my hair. When I was little it was a side part, and then in middle and high school, all the way through my mid 20's it was a center part. After I took a chunk out of my hair with a dremel*** I went back to a side part to cover up the horror that was my hair.

Now with all of this flipping and scrunching and curl staging, I find that any forced part looks odd. I tried a side part and a center part, but every time my curls looked like they were laying wrong. It ruined the mostly messy look that is so attractive to the curls. So I have parted with the idea of a part.

So far this new technique is working alright. I feel my hair looks a little crunchy, but my friends are insisting that it looks really good. I suppose I will trust them for now. The nice thing about hair is that if I decide I don't like it I can change it, and if all else fails, it will grow out and I can try something new.



*Ok so crumbs only happened when my hair was long enough to fall over my shoulders. Besides my hair my boobs catch the most crumbs when eating.

**My friends wouldn't let me walk around looking stupid. I am pretty sure it is because they care and not because they don't want to be judged for being with me.

***It wasn't on purpose. My hair came loose while I was dremeling a table and got wrapped up around the spinning head. I ended up with a 1" nub of hair in the front. It was...traumatic.