Despite the slight uneasiness, I tried to reassure myself as I sat down in the salon chair, looked around, and saw how different my texture was from the other clients. These stylists were curly-hair specialists! I was in good hands! I’ve reported on curly cuts before; I knew they could be transformative. After six years of wearing my hair natural, I was looking forward to seeing those results.
I got a standard shampoo session, then was placed under a hooded dryer to let the deep conditioner penetrate (and, of course, to let my hair dry) before any scissors came near my head. Once the stylist began cutting each curl—and I do mean each individual curl, one at a time—my initial thought was, Wow, this is going to take forever. Thus began my first gripe with curly cuts: “A curly cut can take about an hour and a half to two hours, which includes the wash-and-go styling after the cut,” says New York City-based hairstylist Karen Miller, who specializes in styling and cutting textured hair, both curly and stretched, and works with stars including Quinta Brunson and Solange. “A standard haircut on blown-out textured hair takes about an hour.”
Most curly-cut appointments will end with a natural hairstyle like a twist-out, a braid-out, or, most commonly, a wash-and-go. (Now that you’ve enhanced your curls with the cut, it’s time to show them off, right?!) Despite my protest that wash-and-gos always leave me with a shrunken-up, stiff Afro, the stylists insisted it was the best styling method for my texture. So they coated my hair in copious amounts of gel and mousse before diffusing it. As I predicted, I was left with a shrunk-up Afro. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a TWA, but it’s not what I was used to nor what I felt I signed up for. The shape of my curls looked spiky and as I went to shake my hair, expecting some movement, like the women I saw on TikTok, I got nothing. My curls were stiff.
Did I mismanage my expectations? Maybe. But in the following days, I became convinced that my hair wasn’t meant for curly cuts. The next morning, my curls were dry and coiled together with no bounce or movement. White flakes of gel residue floated down from my hair every time I moved my head ever so slightly.