The Hair of My Dreams

I never knew how crazy my hair really was until I finally grew it out to a substantial length. My hair has been varying degrees of short for most of my life, meaning chin-length or shorter and reaching my shoulders maybe 3 times. Now that my hair is past my collar bones, it has been driving me ridiculously crazy. It's so curly on the bottom that it frizzes out no matter how carefully and tactfully I blow dry it. It's gotten to the point where even a flat iron won't tame it in under an hour. Yuck. But I really am trying to go for record lengths in my hair history book, so I wanted to push through instead of chopping it off.

I mentioned on Friday that I was heading into the salon for the Keratin Smoothing Complex Therapy. Basically, the process involves applying the Keratin treatment to clarified hair, letting it sit, blow drying it, then tediously flat ironing it. I'm talking like 5 hairs per section, ironed about 5 times over. Okay, maybe 20 hairs. It was very few hairs at a time. It took a couple hours, but I left with ridiculously flat and straight hair.

This hair was also very annoying. The last step to the treatment is waiting three days before you get your hair wet, wash it, put it in a clip or a pony tail or even tuck it behind your ears. It has to just hang there. For three days. It was inconvenient, but I suppose it was tolerable. I made sure to schedule the treatment for over the weekend when I didn't have any Pilates or Spin classes, so that helped.

Before, during and after... obviously.

The before picture is after letting my hair air-dry, then wearing it in a bun for a day. If it had been blow dried, it would have been even worse. The during picture is after I came home from my treatment. My hair was stick straight and my bangs were so pokey. The after picture was right after I washed and dried it on Monday and I was thoroughly impressed. My Instagram photo actually makes it look kinda frizzy, so I decided to make an animated gif to prove otherwise. (Why wouldn't this post have an animated gif? Duh.)

I just noticed that this gif is running in reverse. D'oh.

Let me tell you that this is how my hair used to look after blow drying with a round brush with multiple smoothing creams being followed by a flat iron. It took more than an hour to get it this way... that is, in the past! This is after a rough blow dry with a regular vented brush, no smoothing serums or creams and NO flat iron. Uhm. Amazing? Definitely.

Now, I wait. This treatment cost a bit more than I was really comfortable paying, but they say it lasts 3-6 months. I'll just have to wait it out and see how it goes to decide if it was really worth it, but so far, I say yes.