Shear Frustrations

A first: something I've never blogged about. Let's just preface this by saying, I have never had such horrible haircuts in the past 15 months as the other past 11 years of being married. Basically since Brent was born. Got my first post-baby haircut when he was a couple months old. It was cute, but high a-line in the back & heavily razored. Took 8 long months just to get it back to square one. Fast forward to 4 months ago.

I had an old friend who, like me has naturally curly/wavy hair. She had just gotten an amazing haircut & was asking around how to duplicate the look on her own at home. Someone had mentioned to google "Curly Girl Method." Intrigued, I decided to do the same. Basically, there is a book called Curly Girl: The Handbook by Lorraine Massey on Amazon.com that explains the best way to take care of curly/wavy hair. The jest of it is going shampoo or sulfate-shampoo free, as well as avoiding silicones & alcohols in hair products.

I have 1 rebellious hair strand by my face that likes to be straight while the rest of my hair does not. A couple months ago, it had grown quite long and I had cut it on my own (HUGE mistake, I have NEVER done that before and never will again) and ended up getting it fixed by a professional. A couple weeks ago, it was looking rather nice, at an almost shoulder length but I had been bitten by the short hair bug. Despite multiple people telling me to keep growing it longer, I went in for a short trim and well now it is up by my chin. The irony is it was cut by a lady who says she has curly hair--I think she straightens it a LOT though. I told her this last time: no razor, no texturizing, no a-line and she acted like there was nothing left to do with my hair.

It looked okay until the first time I washed it and now a week & a half later I am at my wits' end trying to figure out if I should stick it out again or go to a different salon that specializes in curly hair so that it can be fixed. It's not responding to my usual styling & won't do what I want. The cut would be a lot more than I usually pay--but I typically end up going to one of the cheapest places in town. If I go and get it "fixed" agin, it should grow out awhile before needing a trim--several months because it's a different type of cut. Cut dry & customized to me--called DevaCut, created by the lady who wrote the Curly Girl book. There's a salon less than 10 miles from me. I found it from a website called NaturallyCurly.com and there's a Salon Finder as well as a review section. At any rate, maybe I just need a consult and see what's recommended for products. Could just be a need to change product or needs more layering, like I suspect it does.

the cut that started it all:

8 months later:

About a month ago at a wedding reception:

A couple weeks ago(took with the webcam on our sort of broken-but still functional laptop): not terribly bad but the layers were getting long & weighed down.

The 24th:  this is what I ended up with. Literally hated it less than 24 hours later.

Saturday, the 1st(one week later)--ironically this is after having washed my hair & styling it.

Yeah, so maybe I should go talk with someone who specializes with my hair type.

And for reference, this pic below was 2.5 years ago, while Tom was in Kuwait so somebody knew how to cut my hair: