Success! Heat Free Curls Despite Long Layers

Success!

So, apparently the 3rd 4th try post makes the charm. If you've been following along for the last few weeks, I've been attempting to curl my hair at night. I did not want to use curlers, even little foam ones. I feared ridicule from my hubby (he is a nice guy, but he would laugh since he finds my beauty antics amusing) and strange looks from a half asleep 8 month old at 3 am who may (or may not) recognize mommy.

(If you haven't been following along, first I was excited about sockbun curls, which kept falling out at night. I tried curling my hair with a head band, which worked but some areas were flat (too much hair, not enough band...) So I tried 2 headbands. In a nutshell, all of these attempts were foiled by my crazy thick hair (I have a ton of hair, enough for about 3 people), the length of my hair (it is past my shoulders but somehow too short for the sock bun to work well), or the long layers that I have (the shorter layers love to fall out and refuse to be in a sock bun).

So, via another video, I finally succumbed to using something more like a curler. Well. A rag curler.

Of course, like all things inspirational, this technique was via another Pinterest Pin, that led to a Babble blog post looking at life changing hair videos (OMG, the first 2 are the ones I've already watched... is the entire world on Pinterest??), and the third was this one from YaYa Lifestyle.


So, this isn't really so terribly different than any other tutorial or mention in a magazine telling you to wrap your hair around a ribbon or scrap of t-shirt to curl it. She uses socks, she shows you how she wraps her hair around it and then rolls the whole thing up.

I already have some socks that I was trying to use for my sock buns that weren't so stable. I cut those in half (so I have 4 scraps of material to wrap around my hair), wet my hair and got going!

I only wrapped my hair into 3 sections, though for smaller curls a smaller section would be better. I wanted bigger curls that would be easy to brush out into a mostly straight style. So, 3 sections.

I found that the hair I initially wrapped around the sock (before rolling the whole thing up) was pretty much the part that got curled. I think this is because I wound it around in a corkscrew, rather than the looser rolling. You can see this with the tighter (and higher up) curls that I had in the back. Those were wound tighter and higher up. Because of the way everything is wound and then tied, taking this down was way easier than the other techniques and left the curls intact.

Since this was second day hair I styled it with a dry shampoo. My current fave is by Oliver Ifergan, that stuff adds amazing volume, never makes my hair look dusty/white and the nozzle doesn't clog. I need to write an entire post about it. I sprayed the dry shampoo on my crown, tousled my hair with my fingers and then sprayed some hair spray on the whole thing. Quick and easy, it was about 3 minutes total styling time in the morning.