Square 1...only better!

As I'm sure you know if you're reading this, a couple days ago I chopped off my length and got myself a curly bob. While I completely love it, I'm sort of back at square one with styling. I've got to relearn what my hair wants, not in terms of ingredients because obviously it's still the same hair coming out of my head, but in terms of styling techniques. I'm going to devote the next couple of posts to various styling methods I've tried in the past and methods I'm playing with now that my hair is quite short!

The biggest adjustment in my styling so far has been ditching plopping. I love plopping. My mom tells me I look like Aunt Jemima when I plop. I even made a video about how I use a long sleeve cotton t-shirt to plop (link is on the right side panel if you didn't see it). I credit plopping with enhancing my curl formation and helping the drying process along a little bit. I would generally plop immediately after applying all of my products for about 30 mins to an hour, depending on how much time I had.

However, now that my hair is short, I can just tell that if I attempted a plop, the curls wouldn't sit in the shirt right when I put in the plop, and I predict I'd end up with quite smushed curls.

Thus, I made the decision to give up plopping for this length. The results have actually been very good.

I definitely lost a little bit of curliness with the length loss, which is a hallmark of my 2c/3a status (we tend to get curlier hair when it's longer). However, I have found that with some good scrunching with my product application, I am still getting some good curl.

Basically, scrunching for me has temporarily replaced plopping. I obviously scrunched in products before, but I am now finding that at this length it is better to rely on scrunching for curl formation rather than plopping because the plop would be messy and all over the place, leading to smushed curls.

So that is my first major method change. In my next post, I'll talk about 2nd day hair. My hair is not long enough to pineapple (or put up at all for that matter!), so I will tell you what has replaced pineappling in my styling methodology.
This is my hair styled today. I used Giovanni Tea Triple Treat Shampoo (had to low poo to get out the a-cone from my Deva styling when I got it cut), conditioned with L'oreal Vive Pro Nutri Gloss, then combed it, then applied BotticelliBabe's flax seed gel (my one and only product that requires no other products along with it for great results!) via raking and then scrunching. I used lots of it because you just can't overdo it with that product. I then just fixed my part and let it airdry. Took a couple of hours, which is about on par for what I expected. This is what it looks like tonight. Tomorrow, I'll be using my 2nd day hair technique and I'll post a picture or two of how it turns out.

My Perfect Winter Rinse Out

I like to think of my shower as my own little steamy think tank. I use my shower time to unwind, to think through what's coming up in the next couple of days, and to sort through deep and thought provoking questions. One of the latter popped into my mind in a shower about a week ago: If I love the slip and little bit of protein of L'oreal Vive Pro Nutri Gloss and I love the rich moisture of Aubrey Organics Honeysuckle Rose, what would happen if I combined the two?

The result of this process is my dream winter rinse out.

I started a thread on curltalk asking if anyone ever mixed rinse outs. To my surprise, people apparently do this all the time, but I got more responses that indicated that people would layer rinse out rather than what I meant: literal mixing.

So I thought I'd just answer my own question and experiment.

I took half my normal amount of LVPNG in my hand, then I put the same amount of AOHR, and I used my finger to swirl them together (real scientific, huh?). At first, it looks a little lumpy/cottage cheesy. But with some more blending, something magical happened. The smells joined together so that I could detect both but they were somehow intermingled, and the faint pink cottage cheese blended to a smooth, sparkly white that reminds me of cupcake icing. It feels very rich and little heavy, but I know that if my fine 2c/3a hair didn't get weighed down, it wasn't that heavy.

Ladies, if you have these two conditioners, you have to try mixing them! My hair has never felt so soft and well moisturized post-rinse out. When it's rinsing out, it feels like silk. It's really incredible. It looks like I actually get the best of both worlds: amazing slip courtesy of LVPNG and an injection of moisture from AOHR. Really great stuff. If I had a big enough bottle, I would make a batch of it.