I wanna talk through all the tips and tricks that I have from how to put it on the straws/rollers correctly to how to style it at the end correctly. ‘Cause you can’t just take these out and go. There’s like a whole process at the end of it. Not hard, but a process nonetheless.
So we’re gonna go through all of it and all the tips and tricks along the way, but I also wanna talk about ways that we can do this in an environmentally friendly way because curls are great and cute, but not as cute as turtles and dolphins and we wanna protect them.
So let’s talk about it.
So first, and most obviously, you can use plastic straws. I don’t recommend going out and buying them. But if you already had them in your house you can repurpose them to be rollers.
And I’ve used these about five or six times and they’re still kickin’. So it can be an actually great thing for them instead of being a single-use material, you use them a bunch of times.
And then according to Google, a good way to dispose of them is to put them in a type five plastic container and put that in the recycling bin. That way they don’t end up spending 5,000 years degrading in a landfill or the ocean.
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Another option are paper straws. Now these can be a lot more easily recycled, and they don’t take thousands of years to decompose like plastic. The ones that I bought are very slim.
So I would recommend doing two straws, maybe even three straws at a time, unless you want teeny tiny little curls.
And then the final thing I tested out are these flexi rollers. Basically they are little foam rollers that bend and so you can bend them into the exact shape you want. They’re very easy to use so if you see yourself doing these curls often you could pick up some actual rollers to do it.
I got a pack of six for three bucks at my local beauty supply store, and I really, really like them. And in the future I definitely wanna keep using these.
Okay, so that’s been my Ted Talk on straws. Let’s jump over to wet hair and start the curling process.
To start off these curls your hair needs to be damp, not wet but damp, because it has to dry into its new shape. If you go from like straight out of the shower wet, it’s just gonna take forever to dry.
So right now mine feels wet to the touch. I would say it’s 60, 70% dry. And for whatever reason I find that tight curls kind of show off any dryness in your hair, so you wanna make sure your hair is moisturized as well.
So I’m gonna use some Briogeo Raschera Milk Reparative Leave-In Conditioning Spray. Basically, my leave-in conditioner of choice.
Another product I love for shine is this Nature Lab Perfect Shine Oil Mist.I don’t use a lot of it on my hair. I actually put it on my hand first, and then I run it over my ends.
Okay, and now we brush through the hair to prepare it for curling. So I’m gonna start off with a center part, and then I’m going to section my hair and go in like little sections at a time so that every piece of hair gets curled.
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For our first section, let’s just use normal plastic straws.
I’m gonna take just a little section of hair and I’m gonna wrap it around the straw starting in the middle. Once all the hair is wrapped around, you’re gonna fold the straw in half and secure the two halves together with an elastic. And that’s it. It’s super duper simple.
You can just do that throughout all your hair, but I’m going to give you a few tips and tricks just to make it your own as you go.
First thing’s first, natural curls do not all go in one direction. So definitely make sure that you’re changing the direction of your curls. You can do every other one toward and then away from your face. Or you can just do it randomly. Whatever is good. You just don’t wanna do it the exact same.
Tip number two is that you can change the size of the curls depending on the size section you take. So a smaller section is going to equal a tighter curl that dries a little faster, whereas a bigger section is going to be a looser curl, but it takes just slightly longer to dry.
For me on my hair a tiny section feels like about half a straw, and a larger section feels like a whole straw or maybe like a straw and a half.
Okay, and we’re just gonna keep going until this section is done. Okay, there’s one section done, let’s take down the next. For this section let’s switch over to the paper straws.
Now I haven’t actually tried this yet, but I wanted to see if these would be a good option.
So let me just see, do these, yeah, they bend. These are a little shorter. Let me see if it’ll fit on my hair or not. We’ll find out. Yeah, as far as getting the straws into my hair, very easy, not a problem at all. I do wanna see if they get soggy or weird as my hair dries. We’ll just see how it goes.
Tip number three is real simple. Just remember to brush your hair before you put it on the roller. That way you don’t accidentally dry any snarls or snags or tangles into your curls.
You want these to be frizz free and beautiful, and the way to do that is to brush the hair first.
Now just for fun let’s try the little twist rollers. I think the deal with these is that you wrap your hair around it and then you can twist it into whatever shape you need to for the hair to hold in place.
So if that’s your thing you can go ahead and do that, but I’m still gonna bend them in half and then secure it with an elastic because I want it to match everything else, and I also think that that’s the easiest for me.
Another thing I like is that you can choose the thickness on this, ’cause I feel like, especially the paper straws, are very small for the look I’m going for. So I like that these are a little wider. Oh, that’s quite lovely.
The other cool thing is because these have wire in them, you can literally just bend down the top so that it holds everything in place up there and then bend down the bottom wherever you finish and then secure that with an elastic.
Oh my gosh, you can just bend the bottom up, too, you don’t have to use an elastic. So these are also zero elastics required. I think they just became my favorite.
All right, and now we’re on to our last section, finally.
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Going back to that center part. And I’m gonna finish off with the straws again because this is a straw curl tutorial.
My last tip for you, and this is important, is to get as close to the root as possible, especially from kind of your eyebrows up, because especially if you have naturally straight hair, if your roller doesn’t start until an inch or two down, you’re gonna have straight and then curls, and it might look a little funny.
So I recommend, after you’ve wrapped your hair around the straw, curl it up a couple times like a roller until it’s like on your scalp, like as close as you can get it, and then secure it in place. That way you have nice little ringlets that start up closer to your scalp, rather than awkwardly far away.
Now that I have all the straws in I’m just gonna wait for this to cool. If you have any kind of hairdryer, whether it be just a normal one or a bonnet hairdryer, you can use that to make this go faster, or you can just chill until the hair’s dry.
And we’re back, the hair is dry. I took a little nap, I did some work, and I think we’re ready to take this out.
So here’s the thing, you can’t just take these out and go because it’s gonna look a little funny. Let me show you.
This is what the curl looks like straight off. So I kind of boinged the curl a couple of times and it’s already separated, which is great. We wanna separate each curl at least two or three times as we’re going through. And I think it’s a lot easier to do as you’re taking the hair off the rollers,’cause that way you don’t accidentally end up with one piece that’s like a clump and hasn’t been separated out.
And the reason we’re separating is because when you have natural curls you have more than this amount of curls on your head. If I just took this out and didn’t separate it, all the curls would literally be sitting in little boings like this, which is not what you want. And by boings I mean ringlets.
Let’s check on these paper straws now. I’m interested to see how they went. They’re a little more rigid, not as comfortable to sleep on, just in case you’re wondering. They didn’t become mooshy. I don’t know why that was the fear. But yeah, I was really concerned.
I do think you’d only get one or two uses out of them because it’s already kind of worn right here where it was already bent. But you know, aside from that, let’s keep going.
These are some little curls, my goodness. Okay, over here we’ve got the little roller dudes. I wanna see how they did.
I feel like those turned out way nicer. I think these rods are a little bit of a bigger diameter than the paper straws, and I like it a lot better on my hair.
So now the rollers are out, the curls have been somewhat styled, but we are definitely not there yet. Because this is a little bit of a mullet shape on me right now. We’ve got a little bit of a triangle and a little bit of like a weight line right here. Don’t want that.
So first thing’s first, I think it’s important to do a flip with curly hair. So flip it to one side or the other. Given that this is my preferred side of choice, I’m going to pick up the curls and move them over. I am gonna take some pieces of these back over.
So after you’ve flipped your part, there’s still a little bit more that needs to be done to finesse the curls. This is the side that has not been finessed. This is the side that has been finessed.
So I’m gonna show you on this side what worked over here and also give you a couple extra little tips.
I mean, first thing’s first, if you want a coily curly look you don’t have to do a ton to these. I would probably maybe run some gel or oil through the ends to make sure they’re not extra frizzy. And then if you’re starting to get kind of a triangle shape, you can always hold a little bit of hair at the end of the curl, and then scrunch it back up, and that will shorten the curl and give you the ability to mold a less triangular shape.
So that way it tapers and it’s a little bit rounder. On this side, one thing I needed to fix was that the curls were a little too tight because the paper straws were so slim. This side is a little bit better ’cause I just used the normal straws and then the flexi rods.
But if you do find yourself in a situation where the curls are just way too tight for you and you wanna loosen ’em up a little bit, here’s a trick.
You take your hot tool of choice and then you just run it down the hair once very quickly. It’s actually not gonna add a lot of heat to the hair. The hair barely gets warm. Just try it one time, you’ll see what I mean, but it does relax the curl a little bit.
And the way that you can avoid that situation all together is to use bigger sections or use straws or flexi rods with a larger diameter. So like a smoothie straw versus like a teeny tiny drinking straw.
So for me these ends have a little more of a coiled look to them whereas these taper a little bit more, and I prefer the look of this. The biggest reason that happened is because my ends are very thin. I really need a haircut so they took the curl extra good, which is like a good thing but also a bad thing when you’re going for this.
So there are two ways to fix it.
With any hair tool you can just run your hair over the ends an extra time or two or if you have a little tiny curling iron like this you can actually curl the ends to get a more tapered look. And I know this is a heatless hairstyle, but I feel like if you’re only using heat here and there it’s fine. It’s better than using heat everywhere.
So now I’m just gonna go through and use those trick on my hair. I’m going to loosen up and curls that look tight and loosen up any ends that look too tight and add in gel to add definition and shine.
And there you go, that is the finished look.
This is all kinds of curly goodness, and I think it’s really fun to get to, at least for me, experiment with a different hair texture. And I think for those of you guys with curly or wavy hair, this could be a really great way to kind of set your curls and get them a little bit more tamed than drying normally.
Surprise, I’m back and I’m making a day two appearance because I decided to try something with my hair today and it worked and I wanted to share it with you guys.
So yesterday obviously the curls were tighter than I meant for them to be so I showed you a way to fix it with hot tools, curl by curl, if you want to.
What I really wanted to try, but I was afraid to, because I didn’t want to mess up my hair on the video, was just spritzing it with a little bit of water because if your hair is naturally straighter your hair will loosen with a little bit of water, so I just took my little spray bottle and I did like two or three squirts on each side and let it sit for 15 minutes and it loosened up.
I also used the Nature Lab Perfect Smooth Hair Oil. I just put it on my hands, ran it through the curls, and this is what I’ve ended up with, and I like it a lot. I feel like this is really what I was going for, I was just afraid to try the water.
But I know you guys have been wanting me to kind of share how I kind of fix hairstyles when they don’t go right. And I felt like the water was such a good solution that I wanted to jump on.
I think that’s a good thing to try first. And then if everything’s still looking a little bit tight to you or the ends specifically are looking a little bit tight, then you can go through and try the hot tool tricks.
And if you wanna be able to make these curls last for multiple days like I did, here’s how I slept on it.
Basically I took a silky scarf and I folded it in half so it was a triangle. Then I flipped my head over and put the long side of the triangle against the nape of my neck and tied the ends together at my forehead. Then you just take the little point that’s left and tuck it underneath the knot, tuck everything in, and you’ve got a cute little turban.
You sleep like that, wake up in the morning, let it down, and your curls should be pretty good looking. You might need just like a little bit of oil, maybe a little bit of touch up here and there, but they should still be in place.
That way you can rock these curls for multiple days and all that work will not have been for just one day.
Samantha is a hairstylist with over 12 years of color and stylist experience. She enjoys using her knowledge to create what her clients really want when they sit down in her chair. Her passion is creating unique looks that her clients feel great in.