Adventures in Fat-Girl Beauty

[sarahhhdactyl]

I got an Urban Decay Naked 3 palette yesterday. This is the Anakin Skywalker combination: "Burnout", "Liar", and "Dark Side". I really like this palette - I'm a big Urban Decay fan anyway but don't have much from them. The included brushes are incredibly soft and one of them has a sharp edge for lining. The color goes on smooth, though I did have to put on a couple layers to get more than a shimmer opaque look with "Burnout".

[sarahhhdactyl]

Here's my hair after it has almost entirely dried. It doesn't have as many flyaways as usual, and it's very soft, so the Frizz-Ease products seem like a good choice. The heaviness with the conditioner went away as the hair dried. Hooray!

[sarahhhdactyl]

No pain no gain

Yesterday we went out and got some new stuff for me to try for my brand-spanking-new hair regimen, and I just got out of the shower wherein I used them for the first time. 

I used Frizz-Ease Smooth Start Repairing Shampoo which did a nice job of making my hair feel clean without stripping it down like some chemical-based shampoos I've used. (I usually use the Karma Komba solid shampoo bar from LUSH in combination with one of LUSH's conditioners - I haven't yet found one that's thick enough for my hair, but there are a couple that do the job - Veganese and Happy Happy Joy Joy. I also love the smell of the Jungle solid conditioner, but it's a pain in the ass to use). 

For the conditioner this time, I used, again, Frizz-Ease, Rehydrate Intense Conditioner. The directions said to leave it in for 3-5 minutes. In my experience, leaving conditioner in, while it doesn't hurt, doesn't really do much to help unless it's a deep conditioning treatment or something like that. Even so, since it was my first time using it, I went ahead and left it on the entire time while I did the rest of my shower stuff.

For soap, I've been using Karma by LUSH (are you sensing a pattern in my skincare/hygiene products?), which is a really nice solid soap that smells freaking amazing. If I'm feeling really grimy, I'll use the Happy Hippy shower gel and a loofa because it makes me feel cleaner.  Keep in mind, Jess finds that particular shower gel to be drying to her skin so if you're prone to dry skin, that's not the way to go. 

I have PCOS, which means I've got a nice 5 o'clock shadow by the time I get home from work, which is AWESOME, by the way. So to waylay that because I have yet to find anything else that is not a billion dollars or that requires me to have a few inches of hair growth to remove it, I use The Art of Shaving's Lather Up Shaving Cream in Lemon because it doesn't smell too musky but still works on the coarse hair, along with a Shick Hydro 5-blade razor. BY THE WAY, PCOS sucks serious ballsacks. I don't have as many of the medical symptoms like the blood sugar issues that a lot of people do, but I have a lot of the "cosmetic" issues, primarily the hair growth, and my OB/GYN was basically like "Well, anti-androgens aren't legal in the US for this sort of thing, but here's a water pill that may or may not do the same thing but will mostly just make your stomach hurt.) Also as a totally random aside, having facial hair makes me really self-conscious and that has never been more obvious then when I'm interacting with straight dudes who fetishize lesbian relationships because "obviously [I'm] the dude because of the beard. Do you use a strap on?" NO FUCK YOU ASSHOLE. 

ANYWAY. So after all that, I rinsed out the conditioner with super-cold water to seal the cuticle. Instead of drying it with a towel, I used an old Clone Wars t-shirt Jess has been begging me to get rid of for years now, just kind of squeezing the water out of my hair and onto Anakin and Obi-Wan's faces. They like it, it's okay. Then I used Frizz-Ease Dream Curls Curl Perfecting Spray and combed it through my wet hair with a wide-toothed comb. And... that's it. OH! And I used Herbalism facial wash, which both Jess and I really like. 

So we'll see how this works out.  The conditioner felt kind of heavy, but my hair is still pretty wet so we'll see what it's like when it's dry. 

[sarahhhdactyl]

WTF is happening to my head?

I've gone through a lot of phases with my hair, the first being this horrible, frizzy mop of awful I sported up until 8th grade, when I decided I was "Goth" and started doing other stuff to it, like bleaching and dying and straightening. In 12th grade, I decided I hated everything about everything and chopped it all off with a pair of kitchen scissors in my parents' bathroom. It was horrific. Protip, kids, if you're having teen angst and thinking about cutting all your hair off, don't. Unless you have a license to cut people's hair. 

In any case, I let it grow back out after that, although I did not take good care of it. I still dyed and straightened it, which is all fine if you're otherwise taking care of your hair, but I wasn't. I wasn't really taking care of much of myself at that time, honestly, and my hair really suffered for it. It didn't get brushed or washed nearly enough, and it just kind of hung there dead-straw-like for a really long time.

Then Jess came and I started thinking maybe I was a worthwhile human being who deserved to have nice things/hair and I started taking better care of myself. My first haircut in a very long time was done in Arizona, where I got about six inches chopped so that it lay just above my shoulders. I loved that haircut, but in order to make it look halfway decent, I had to flat-iron my hair every single day.

And every subsequent cut after that - I've gotten it cut short again a few times now - has been one that relied on having straight hair, which I decidedly do not. I've been fighting this fact my entire life; it has not always been curly, either, more like just waves of frizz. But it's not straight, so I have to make it that way with heat and chemicals.  After bleaching out the front two strands a couple years ago for my Rogue Halloween costume to the point they nearly fell out and my hairdresser described the texture of cutting it like "a knife through warm butter", I decided to once again grow it out and maybe be a bit nicer to it. I started using henna dye instead of chemical dye, but in full disclosure, I have two boxes of the chemical stuff on the counter behind me because the henna, while healthy and natural and effective, is fucking messy as shit and REALLY hard to apply evenly. 

In any case, I still straightened my hair every single day. Because I have straight hair dammit! Except, I don't. Except when I let it dry naturally, now that it's long enough to have some weight on it, it looks like what Jess calls "mermaid hair", gentle curly ringlets that actually don't look terrible. 

I've decided to embrace my curly hair, which is why I started this blog. This is a journey through figuring out what works best for me, for my hair, as well as an exploration of other beauty products and makeup Jess and I use. We have very different hair and skin types (she has very thick hair and sensitive skin, and I have extremely fine hair and kind of "eh, whatever" skin). The problem I was having the past couple days looking for "curly hair maintenance" tips was that most of the women posting about it have thick, coarse, curly hair, whereas mine is baby-fine. I have a lot of it, though, and the combination of "extremely fine hair" and "mass quantities" is a lot of tangles, knots, and sometimes even mats, if I were to follow the typical curly-hair care regimen. So I'm making my own. And I thought, hey, maybe other women might want something similiar, and again, Jess and I have different beauty/skin-care needs, so between the two of us, maybe we can help some people out, or something.

So join me on my journey to curly-hair nirvana. Leave your brush at home.