After several months in the dry climate of my home state in the US, I learned to appreciate a lack of humidity as far as my hair was concerned. (skin is another story altogether).

So, now I am back and facing my timeless battle of the frizzy hair. Since I went prematurely gray at a fairly young age, I color my hair. The gray hair is the cause of the frizz

I've looked at chemical hair straightening but am unsure if it is compatible with regular hair coloring (ie every 3 weeks at a minimum) and if dead straight hair is really where I want to go. I like the curl in my hair, just not the frizz.

Now, I can get reasonably unfrizzy hair with a serious amount of product in my hair (and I do mean serious!) but is there any other alternatives for someone like me?

signed,

frustrated and frizzy

I like the curl in my hair, just not the frizz.

Now, I can get reasonably unfrizzy hair with a serious amount of product in my hair (and I do mean serious!) but is there any other alternatives for someone like me?

signed,

frustrated and frizzy

Hey Frizzy!

My hair is naturally wavy (I wear it really long) but gets frizzy, too if I don't keep on top of it. Here's what has worked for me:

- olive oil or coconut oil - right now I'm using Organic's Olive Oil Leave-in Conditioner. It's not greasy - my hair just soaks it up like it's thirsty! I don't know if you can get this over here, I just brought a ton of it with me, but I'm sure there have got to be products similar. They also make this in an aerosol form which works equally well. Look for extra virgin olive oil as the ingredient. I put this on in the morning before I go out, or if I've been out and it's starting to look dry again. It's not heavy - it just restores the moisture nicely and maintains my curl.

- Alberto VO5 for normal/dry hair. Been around for years - in fact my mom used it! But tried and true, it still works great for my hair. Smells absolutely horrible, though. But after I take a shower I rub this through my hair, and use a lot at the ends. Prevents it from splitting and getting dry. I braid my hair before I go to sleep and in the morning my hair feels so soft! Helps keep it looking shiny, too. As above I don't know if you can get this over here though. I'm sure you could get it shipped online. It's extremely cheap stuff, if you can get past the smell it's powerful and works miracles.

Using these two products you have to use a really good shampoo or else especially the VO5 will begin to build up on your hair, and you'll have the opposite problem. It will look weighed down, dirty and gross. I will even use a shampoo designed for oily hair which helps strip the stuff out, followed up by a good conditioner.

Good luck!

WaatWang

sbk, go yemenite! accentuate the wave/curl by not brushing it, but scrunching with hair stuff of your choice... no israeli with that kind of hair would ever brush it out. just a quick comb thru after the shower then shake your head around several times and voila, scrunched hair

... we go for the crunchy wavy look. the frizz look is, as my daughters remind me, sooooo american or soooooo russian... i found that in thailand my hair also got back its scrunched curls look that others pay money for

have just coloured my hair for the first time ever , it was on yom kippur and daughter and friends were bored so they did it to me... not sure i would do anything chemical on top of that. i wouldnt want to crisp my hair.

bina

Hey sbk.

About 5 year ago i had my waist length curly hair straightened because i was straightening it everyday at that time. I was naive to think that it would eventually soften into curls again, albeit looser ones. I didnt have a good understanding of the process and i soon morned my lack of curls. My hair just felt lifeless. Even when i straightened my curly hair it had body. So, my personal experience was one of regret regarding straightening, but i know some other women love it. Thing is, it wasnt a Yuki straightening, so didnt go poker straight and smooth. It did go straight, but it also needed smoothing with irons as there was still a bit of frizz. Also, of course, it grew in curly. So in the end i had to just keep waiting for it to grow out to a length where i could have the straight parts cut off. Oh was so sad to see my long hair end up just at shoulder length! Anyway..just have a good think about that one.

As for frizz, well i do a lot of deep moisturizing treatments. One that i really recommend is a once a week deep condition with cold press coconut oil. Coconut oil is one of the oils that will penetrate the hair shaft. After an hour or so (or overnight if u can handle sleeping turban style!), use a gentle shampoo to get rid of the excess, then condition with a reg conditioner. Also, if u wash your hair everyday, no need to shampoo each time. On alternate days just use conditioner so you dont strip the hair of oils.

I find that switching your hair products from time to time helps too,because i read that hair can get used to certain products.

Finally, i also think coconut oil is great on dry hair, but have to be careful not to use too much if using pure cold press as the hair can look oily. Again, great for hair because it penetrates the hair shaft. Other than that i switch between using a clear hair serum or my indulgence of tigi bed head After Party. Its a miracle cream! Smells great and doesnt feel weighty or greasy. Expensive but lasts a really long time. Hate products that make my hair feel sticky or weighed down. Oh..tigi also do a shine spray, which i recently bought to try out. You use it like hairspray (which i hate!), but it sprays a fine mist that conditions and smooths the hair.

Hair conditioning products are an indulgence i love.

hair conditioning products are not an indulgence for me but a necessity

I have done the oil in the past, and it does help for a day or so. I do not shampoo my hair every day, it strips the color and the natural oils. I do the scrunchy thing, product on the hair, towel dry it, then twirl the hair around my fingers to give it a corkscrew effect. After it air dries I fluff it out and it comes out curly. Which worked like a charm in the US, but here, the frizz factor creeps in in the afternoon. I do have the anti-frizz serum from the US, and lets see, hmm, shall I list?

aveda anti humectant pomade

aveda confixor liquid gel

aveda be curl curl enhancing gel

defining systems protein sculpting oil (makes my hair fairly soft)

garnier fructis leave in conditioner

john frieda frizz ease and shine shock gel

oh and some schwarzkopf serum I bought in bangkok

like I said, I product the heck out of my hair

My hair dresser told me to grow out the layers, that the layers can frizz up and if the hair is one length it will be heavier and weigh down more as well. so am in the process of doing that.

just hoping for a mirace solution I guess

Hmm...you know i just remembered something. I had a friend who used to put in some regular conditioner after conditioning and towel drying. Her hair was afro though, but it defined the curls and conditioned them. Gave the look of having some kind of product to help define and add shine, sort of like beachy hair.

I tried it in the UK, but was too heavy for my hair. I think i may just try it out here though.

Might be worth giving that a try? Cant do any harm!

As you may recall I posted a similar lament last rainy season.

Tried all the varuiious prioducts suggested. Help only a little and grease up my hair with result I have to shampoo more often. My hair is ultra fine and takes hours to dry so I do NOT like to shampoo more often that I need to (plus there is the color aspect i.e. trying to keep the grey at the tmeples covered).

I haven't tried the Organic Olive Oil Leave-In mentioned, don't think it is available here in Thailand. None of the leave in conditioners I find here work well for me, they all leave my hair limp and oily. I think for Thais putting on product and washing hair daily is not hard as their hair dries quite fast but not mine...

Anyhow the only thing I have found that half-way works is to go to a shop and have them blow dry my hair with high heat after I've washed it and then use those tong things to make it straight. Like you, utterly strauight is not my preference, but it is better than the Frizzies and nothing I style my hair into holds in the rainy season humidity anyhow.

I find that done straight like this it holds up pretty well unless it actually gets rained on or I get really sweaty. So I have kind of resigned myself to a completely sdtraight style in the rainy season.

The chemical hair starighteners do indeed dry and damage the hair (just like coloring does). Also I am not sure that chemical straightenres will get the same effect as the heat/tong bit does. I think what the latter achieves is like a temporary rebonding.

I have considered actual rebonding at start of rainy season but as I relish being able to actually style my hair again once the humidity eases up I am hesitant, does anyone know how long it lasts? I.e. would it make sense to do rebonding in early May and hope to be able to style/curl my hair by late November?

Sheryl, can only give you my own experience of hair rebonding, but might be different for others. I had it done 5 year ago by lady recommended to me (and she had won a lot of awards etc, which i think is important..to make sure the person wont make a mess of it. I think in Thailand its even more important, because i heard that Thai hair is a bit different to Farang hair in structure.) I was really amazed afterwards because although it was blown dry straight, it didnt take any effort, and, after that, it stayed straight. This was during the most humid time at a beach side town in Argentina. Very humid. But, when i did wash it, i still had to style it straight and run irons over it, just not very much. However, i have very curly hair, inherited from my Italian side, so im not surprised it didnt dry poker straight on its own (plus i had asked for the treatment not to be on my hair too long as i was concerned about damage).

But, as i said above, after the initial joy of having hair that would go straight so easy, i began to miss the flexibility of my own hair. With my own hair i can straight dry it to still curl at the ends, or wave it. It holds any wavy style. After the straightening process, it wouldnt hold any wave or flick or curl. My style was straight..and ...straight.. and.. straight. So, although i loathe the hard work that the rainy season gives me, ill keep my own natural curls over straight.

Also, the result was permanent. Im not sure if this is the case always or not, but the solution changes the hair structure. I can understand that a perm can loosen out, but im not sure if rebonding does the same. Certainly wasnt in my case, unfortunate, because i didnt realise it would be permanent. Eventually when my hair had grown out long enough, i had to have all the straight hair cut off. I say had to because i couldnt get my hair that had grown out to be as straight as the bottom. Was weird if my hair got a bit wet or anything and having the top half curl up and the bottom stay straight!

As for other opinions I recall something written about it in the Pattaya section. I believe someone asked where to go and a few girls replied (think one was "Meg") about what to go for and their own experiences.

Thanks, Eek. Like you, I like to have my hair straight but then be able to curl the ends. For at least half the year that is all an exercise in futility as the humidity undoes all efforts and produces pure frizz, but I'm not ready for permanently straight hair to avoid that.

Guess I'll stick with current system. As long as I get the local shop after each shampoo, I look fairly OK most of the time.

But oh do I look forward to the coming dry months!!!

After several months in the dry climate of my home state in the US, I learned to appreciate a lack of humidity as far as my hair was concerned. (skin is another story altogether).

So, now I am back and facing my timeless battle of the frizzy hair. Since I went prematurely gray at a fairly young age, I color my hair. The gray hair is the cause of the frizz

I've looked at chemical hair straightening but am unsure if it is compatible with regular hair coloring (ie every 3 weeks at a minimum) and if dead straight hair is really where I want to go. I like the curl in my hair, just not the frizz.

Now, I can get reasonably unfrizzy hair with a serious amount of product in my hair (and I do mean serious!) but is there any other alternatives for someone like me?

signed,

frustrated and frizzy

I understand where you are coming from. Men can be a little too vain, me too. I prefer non frizzy hair, and I am lucky that my wife has lovely hair. Even in a great marriage, men generally look at other women and "compare". It seems that this is the state of the male human condition.Nevertheless, we can all learn to be more content with who we and our partners are. For example, I used to play professional hockey, and got a few teeth knocked out. When I got them fixed, I ended up getting some other teeth filed down and capped, and now my teeth look more "perfect", but I liked them much better the way they were. However its done, so I accept it and move on, however with the benefit of hindsite I would have left my natural teeth slightly irregular. Now when I see people with perfect very white teeth I think it looks silly. It may seem irrational to others, but thats my thing.We all have these things to deal with in varying degrees SBK. Take good care, and don't worry too much about it.

I have gone through the I want to keep it long to look feminine although it goes frizzy and I look like a witch until I was persuaded to rebond it because I misunderstood it with some extension method.. I looked like a sexy kitten for a good 8 months, far too much male attention because being dark haired and having olive skin has been a good disguise in the crowd until then. It was a paradisiac wash and go situation accompanied by several long hair treatment sessions and frequent colouring because when it's straight the roots are well in evidence. At the end of last year I got left with 'some' hair that looked very depressing indeed.. But now I have gone for an extremely short cut and I don't give a monkey about my hair anymore or what others think, I love it, don't have to buy many products to please the eye and most of all I got my natural thick healthy hair back that looks the same as in Europe. In addition to that I don't need to colour as often as every three weeks anymore which is wonderful. For the life of me I wouldn't go through rebonding again, not even wtih the best hairstylist in town. I lost hair in chunks when I did it and it wasn't a good feeling at all.

going orthodox jewish for a while and do the head coverings; or ninja style muslem head covering as we all discussed sometime last year ... then u dont have to worry about hair at all.

i can send u some amazing head gear if need be ))

or go for the gamine look: practically shaved head heavy eye liner

frankly, i gave up long ago fighting to make my hair do what it cant. this past week is hamsin and so dry we all are getting bloody noses, dry flakey skin etc. and my hair is crunchy, and full of static electricity where as when its humid out i have hair like alpaca fur (for thsoe that dont know what that looks like, google alpaca wool to see first hand)...

when i got married, the thai hair lady in the village used something that made my hair stay in place ;as a matter of fact it worked so well i couldnt get it all out for like four days. no frizz either.

bina

israel

try coconut oil in your hair overnight before washing the next morning.

when I was a kid my grandmother used to make this conditioner: kafir lime and coconut milk, put on your hair after washing then rinse off. I miss my grandma ... she did some cool traditional things (just checked with Mom how to make that conditioner - basically take a kafir lime, boil in water. retain that water to 'milk' the coconut. use the end product to condition.

Interesting, miggie, given the abundance of coconuts here, I shall give this one a try. And its free. Kaffir lime, check. Coconuts, check.

Nah, I am stubborn and determined to not be a frizz head. Perhaps its because its a fairly recent phenomenon, I still recall what my hair used to be like so I have a hard time giving that up

SBK - just to be clear that you need the actual kaffir lime not just the leaf. people are so used to only the leaf in cooking

After several months in the dry climate of my home state in the US, I learned to appreciate a lack of humidity as far as my hair was concerned. (skin is another story altogether).

So, now I am back and facing my timeless battle of the frizzy hair. Since I went prematurely gray at a fairly young age, I color my hair. The gray hair is the cause of the frizz

I've looked at chemical hair straightening but am unsure if it is compatible with regular hair coloring (ie every 3 weeks at a minimum) and if dead straight hair is really where I want to go. I like the curl in my hair, just not the frizz.

Now, I can get reasonably unfrizzy hair with a serious amount of product in my hair (and I do mean serious!) but is there any other alternatives for someone like me?

signed,

frustrated and frizzy

I know exactly what you mean and find that regular visits to any Thai hair salon for a 'wash and blow dry' eliminates any frizz due to their expert blowdrying technique. This usually costs around 150 baht and my hair remains straightish and frizz-free for a good 5 days

I have friends who absoluetly swear by the kerastase oleo relax range. I think you can buy it in BKK. Remember seeing it in MBK I think? If not definitely Malaysia, or mail order. Give that a go.

I am quite lucky, my hair and skin both love the climate here and loathe the dryness of England - horrah!

..... my hair remains straightish and frizz-free for a good 5 days

arent you lucky

with my hair Ill be blessed if it can last close to 5 hours! usually less than 2 hours (even thats pushing it....more like an hour!) and it already starts to go astray. hence why i dont even bother. from leaving the salon to getting into a taxi to go to whatever party....its already wasted effort

Humidity especially this time of year makes the hair super frizzy its true...

Brazillian Keratin has now arrived in Bangkok - SBK went to THE CORNER SALON run by Paweerada - She got a wonderful thermal keratin treatment which eliminated her frizz as she mentions in another post in this forum. This will last 3-5 months depending on how well the hair is looked after.

In california Keratin hair straightening costs $300-500 USD

The Corner Salon is doing it for 3000 baht upwards - Say goodbye to your frizz, infact anyone can get keratin treatment whether you have frizz or not.

Jeniffer Aniston uses it a lot i believe...