5 Essential Curly Girl Method Terms You Need To Know

Plopping doesn’t sound like something you would do with your hair, but its an essential step in the styling process. Plopping is a technique to remove excess water from your wavy hair prior to air drying or diffusing. It doesn’t dry out your waves and avoids disrupting the wave pattern. It allows the products to absorb into your hair. Find out more about plopping here.

Once your hair is in a ‘cast’ you may resemble an 80s rocker with crispy waves or curls. However, this is exactly the look your are aiming for on your dried hair. A cast can help give you smooth, clumpy waves once it has been removed.

A cast is achieved by applying styling products onto wet or damp hair. For wavy hair, a strong cast is needed. You need to allow your hair to dry fully, with your preferred method (diffusing or air dry) and the key in this stage is to keep touching to a minimum, as tempting as it may be! By allowing it to dry with the products in and minimal touching, it give the styling products a chance to form a hard surface around your hair. This gives the cuticle a chance to lie flat, giving your smooth hair.

Once you have achieved the coveted ‘cast’ the next important step to understand is how to break it, this is known as ‘Scrunching out the crunch’. You may see the abbreviations SOTC being widely used.

As mentioned above, unless you like the 80s rocker look then you need to break your cast and ‘Scrunch out the crunch’. Before you try any of these techniques, your hair must be 100% dry.

There are a few options to SOTC, the cheapest one being, use your bare hands! Just gently take small sections of your hair and scrunch upwards, like you would have done when applying the styling products.

Another option is to use a silk scarf to scrunch, as this gives a layer of protection. All you have to do is drape a scarf across your palms and scrunch in the same way as above.

A final option is to use a hair oil. Make sure it’s a suitable oil for wavy hair. Rub a couple of drops of oil between your palms before scrunching. The oil will help break up the cast, add extra shine and tame any unwanted frizz.

To put it simply, clumping is strands of hair gathering together to form a bigger wave patter. To achieve clumps you need 4 things: water, moisturiser, styler, and method.

A pineapple is a delicious tropical fruit but it is also a great way to tie wavy hair up without losing the pattern or causing any damage.

Creating a pineapple in your hair is very simple, all you need to do is gather your hair into a high ponytail and secure with a silk scrunchie but on the last loop, don’t pull it all the way through.

This hair style can be used for exercising, when you just want your hair tied up or to sleep with to protect your hair.