The return of the curls

My hair is going curly again; I’m blaming the hormones. My curls are a phenomenon that first began when I was about 12 years old. Up until that point, I had been a true child of the ‘80s and had gotten nice, tight perms every few months, which I would inevitably then get cut into a hairstyle that made me look more like a middle-aged librarian than the fourth grader that I was.

But then, as I entered adolescence, something started to change: I didn’t need perms anymore. Through no effort of my own, my hair was staying curly, which was ironic, because by that point I no longer wanted curly hair. As I grew older and my hair got curlier, I would look at girls with straight hair and feel rage.

“They don’t even know how good they’ve got it,” I’d think to myself as I watched my hair double in size from morning till night. “Look at them: smooth ponytails and bedhead that lays flat with one brush-through. How dare they???”
And that’s how it went throughout my adolescence and early adulthood. Luckily for me, when I was halfway through college, a friend introduced me to the wonderful world of round brushes and hair straightening irons, which opened up a whole new world of styling options that had previously been unavailable to me. Suddenly, I could choose each day if I wanted to go curly or straight. It was like being born again.

Once I got married and started having children, something in my body chemistry shifted enough that my curly hair started going away, just as gradually as it had come on when I was a teenager. By the time my last child was born, my hair was wavy at best, and I couldn’t coax a tight curl out of it if my life depended on it (fortunately, lives don’t usually depend on things like that).

But recently, all that has started to change. I first noticed it when we visited Disneyworld in the spring and I was outdoors in the humid Florida air all day long. I mentioned in a previous column how the humidity made my daughter Jane’s naturally curly hair puff up so much that it had to be manually patted down by airport security on our return trip home. My hair didn’t come close to that level of curl, but it was certainly enough that it was impossible to ignore the change.

Then, just last week, I was getting ready for the day and thought, “What the heck; let’s pull out some of my old curly-hair tools and see what I can do.” I attached the diffuser to my hair dryer, put some curl-inducing product into my hair, and started drying my hair the way I used to all those years ago: first flipping my head upside down to get some lift off the roots, then gently placing small sections of hair into the tines of the diffuser to let them bask in the blast of heat. 

After a minute or two, I stood upright, gasped at the insane mop my hair had become, and then continued moving the diffuser from section to section until all my hair was dry. The curls were everywhere. My old frenemy had returned.

Unfortunately for me, my current haircut does not lend itself well to curly hair; I kind of look like a mid-forties version of Shirley Temple, and not at all in a cute way.

“I fell in love with a curly-haired woman,” Logan said when he saw my new ‘do. “I love it—you should wear it curly more often.”

Maybe I will. But I’m grateful that, this time around, I have the magical tools of Sir Round Brush and Wizard Flat Iron on my side so I can morph from curly to straight as I see fit. My 12-year-old self would have died of happiness.