I can’t stand drying my hair. I really envy middle-aged adult people who wash and go (do these people exist? I don’t know any) but I also envy people who accept that getting their hair to look presentable is going to take awhile.
I’ve resented this concept for most of my adult life. I don’t like anything about it. Not the heat protection, not the drying itself, not the styling products, not the additional tools that you might want to use when it’s finally dry. The whole thing is a monumental bore. I wouldn’t mind if my hair then looked amazing, but this is just to get it looking normal.
It would be one thing to be thinking, while all this is going on, that I was giving my hair a lovely treat. What I’m thinking instead, at every stage, is: this can’t be good for it. Not the heat, not the gunky products, not the pulling to try and smooth it—none of it.
Also, while I don’t mind occasionally spending ages doing my face, I somehow resent spending ages doing my hair. It was ever thus. When I was young I had too much hair and it was too curly and too unruly; now I am older, it is too thin, too fragile, too frizzy—and still, somehow, unruly. It drives me mad.
One solution is letting it dry naturally, which is what I usually do. I wash it and tie it back loosely and go about my day. The problem here is that it is then completely flat, so I have to go in with a volumizing spray after the event.
A better solution is to use a really good air-drying product—and, happily, I have a new favorite. I am sorry to say that the brand is Living Proof, yet again. There are other haircare brands I really rate when it comes to styling difficult hair. Well, there’s one other one, which is Color Wow. So whenever I write about hair things, I write about one of these two brands. I am sorry about this because I don’t like having teacher’s pet brands, but what can I do? They’re the only two I have used consistently for years and years and would genuinely be lost without.
Having said that, I also rate some in-salon brands. If you like your hairdresser, talk to them about what they recommend you use on your specific hair—they’re unlikely to give you a bum steer.
Anyway, Living Proof Style Lab Air-Dry Styler is what I recommend to you without knowing your specific hair. It does this weird thing of speeding up drying time, for starters (this isn’t just my impression, it is a fact). But it’s also very good at texture. Often if you want to kill the frizz, you make your hair so flat that it’s like a sort of extended monsignoral cap, which for me is hopeless. Or you weigh it down, which I can’t afford, what with the thinness. You lose some of your hair’s character. But not with this. The frizz is about 90 per cent gone, but the hair remains itself. Waves are waves, curls are curls, volume is volume. Once hair is dry, it looks like you have the hair you (or rather I) don’t have: natural, undone and just right. Basically it looks like you washed and went. Which you sort of did.
India Knight is a U.K.-based journalist and the author of India Knight’s Beauty Edit: What Works When You’re Older
