FINALLY: A Haircut and I Give Unsolicited Advice

Well. It has been like three months or maybe longer, but I finally followed through and got a haircut. It basically grew back to the length it had been before I got it cut short. That is how bad I am at adulting. I am just bad at hair.

Complete with temporary curls, behold: new hair.

It isn't my fault (...yes it is). No one ever taught me how to deal with hair! Hair is a SKILL you need a hair savvy mom or older sister to teach you. I can't braid my hair, I can't use fancy pins or slides to put part of it back. I have two sorts of hair: Up and Down. Up is a ponytail of varying size, Down is just that. Down. 

I spent the majority of my childhood trying to avoid my mother's attempts to style my hair, because she wasn't good with a curling iron and kept accidentally burning my skull by holding the iron too close to my head. Also it kept catching my hair and pulling strands out. Also the curls only lasted about 15 minutes before they were back to Down, so why bother? Eventually we settled on a style that worked okay-ish, but it involved me hacking off all of my hair (actually a stylist did it) and starting over.

My hair game was terrible for most of my life. Heck, it is still terrible some days. But it is much improved, and that is because I have learned to cope with having my hair, which is both thick AND fine.

Here are some things to know about thick hair: 

1. Thick hair is your enemy. It is the bossy girl on the playground who will only play the games she makes up and no other game and insists that you join in or else she'll treat you like dirt. You don't want to be friends, but you have to deal with her anyway. Thick hair is like that. It will defeat any style you attempt to inflict upon it, so stop fighting. Let it do what it wants to do and move on. 
2. Everyone will envy your hair and refuse to acknowledge that the struggle is real. The struggle is real.
3. Get used to broken hair elastics and bent bobby pins. No clip or slide will ever close. Just buy elastics in bulk and don't get too attached.
4. If you do not use a blow dryer, your hair will never dry ever, even if you wash it the night before.
5. If you do not use products, your hair will own you and create its own style, even if that style means you can't see all day, or a chunk is pointing directly vertical for no reason you can discern.

Oh, but just when you think you understand think hair, get ready for fine hair:

1. Fine hair refuses to accept your hair products.
2. Also wait, you have hard water? You will never have volume. Give up now.
3. Seriously, all of these hair products are bumming fine hair out. It wants to lie down and cry. It's just going to do that for a while.
4. Except you wore a wool sweater today so it will FLY ABOUT and STICK TO THINGS! STATIC! EVERYWHERE!
5. Basically fine hair is sort of bipolar.

After trial-and-error, lots of terrible hair, and tons of money I wasted buying stuff that only made me look homeless, I have a few things I love for thick AND fine hair. 

one / two / three / four / five

I'm trying out this conditioner because it is especially for fine hair and I wondered if it might be even more lightweight than the Clear Total Care Conditioner. I can only hope. I have liked Macadamia Healing Oil Spray in the past because it deals with all the dryness of my during the winter, but right now I'm trying this out because it's so much cheaper and comes highly recommended.

Clearly, I am not a hair stylist. This stuff works for me. It might not work for you, and that's okay! If you have something you like better, tell me in the comments!