I really think I'm on the right track with my hair these days, and so I just wanted to come into this thread and reflect a little bit.
So, on the last day of June, I did a reset wash and restarted the Curly Girl Method. Before this, I had already been daily or every other day cowashing, but I wasn't doing it well enough, and I wasn't applying much of anything once I got out of the shower. I could see some improvements to my hair when I did the cowash and then add gel as CGM dictates.
About two weeks into CGM, I realized that CGM was about more than just cowash and gel; it's about making sure one is hydrating their hair. It occurred to me that I should be trying, with each wash, to achieve a seaweed-type of feeling in my hair that indicates there's a lot of water in my hair topped off with a lot of conditioner. Before this realization, that wasn't necessarily the case. I was thinking that just a little water and a lot of conditioner was the key to healthy hair, and that's because I could never get a lot of water into my hair.
So, I started focusing on achieving that seaweed feeling, which really resulted on me focusing on getting a lot of water into my hair. This resulted in me creating a routine for my shower which consisted of using music to time all of the steps of my routine.
- Wet hair for the length of one song
- Condition/cowash for the length of one song
- Rinse for the length of one song
- Condition for the length of one song
I'm currently using two products: Suave Everlasting Sunshine Conditioner and Wetline Extreme Gel. I've used either Not Your Mother's Curl Talk sulfate-free shampoo or Suave Everlasting Sunshine Shampoo (sulfates) when I've decided to shampoo my hair. I like using the ES conditioner because it's cheap so I can use palmfuls and not feel guilty about it. And I love how it's proven to me that I don't actually need an expensive conditioner to get results, because the conditioner is just meant to trap in all that good water.
I felt like I was doing the MHM during the first week because I was doing this routine everyday. In the first couple of weeks, I stuck to this concretely. My showers/baths took a long time (because I wash my hair in sections). But there was a lot of turning the water on/off throughout the process.
I started noticing results fairly quickly.
- My hair clumps a bit better, both wet and dry
- My hair relaxes more quickly under water, indicating it's actually getting wet and weighed down by water
- My hair hangs more, despite also clumping/waving up more
- A bit more shine
- My hair is less tangled and just generally easier to deal with. In the first few days of this routine, I struggled because my dry hair wouldn't get wet easily, and it wouldn't detangle easily
- The entire process that I listed above actually takes less time now, because before I was using the music as a timer to force myself to slow down and give my hair time to actually respond to water and conditioner. Now, my hair is responding better to both, so it doesn't take a full song to get my hair wet, or a full song to properly detangle.
The more I do my hair, the more hydrated it becomes. I feel like by the end of the year, I'm gonna have a completely different head of hair.
I spend a lot of time on the curlyhair subreddit and it kinda discourages me that there are looser curlies and wavies who have spent years straightening their hair and seeing results quickly with CGM. But, I also feel like a lot them were probably also wetting their hair a lot despite this (some people wash and straighten their hair everyday). So despite damaging their hair, they're still hydrating it. I realized that my hair is actually probably healthier than a lot of heads in that subreddit, it's just I've had bad luck getting water into my hair, and so it's just been a dry poofball for so long.