Curly girl with an unfriendly haircut :(

[shanniesue2]

I have naturally very wavy hair... if I let it dry without doing anything, it's wavy... only takes a little scrunching to really turn the waves into curls. Well is was getting too long... and just generally looking ratty. I am between hairstylists right now and can't afford to go to someone really high end. Well one of my colleagues has a daughter who works for supercuts and only charges $10 to cut hair for the people who work with her mom. So I asked for a slightly shorter than shoulder length cut. I've had my hair that length before with fairly good results. Well the way she cut it does not work well with my waves. I can't get the scrunching them to work. I tried a diffuser (with the fingers) to no avail. Even tried adding hairspray to my regimine... no luck. My hair just looks blah... so I went from ratty to blah

Yesterday, I gave up and got the flat iron out. It looks pretty good when I straighten it. But I love being a curly girl and my heart is sad that I just can't get my curls to work with this cut
Plus, I know the heat damages the curl. But I'm just too vain (I'll admit it) to go around looking the way I look when I try to make this cut curly. So I guess I'm gonna go with straightening it until it grows out a bit. Just looking for a place to whine about it...

[amber913]

I would assume she didn't add layers? Or perhaps the length doesn't quite work? But yeah, i guess you just have to work with it until you can get it done by someone else.

I wonder--how does straightening it damage the curl? I have my cosmetology license, and from what i was taught, the only way to damage the curl is with chemicals (or over-use of heat which would damage the hair in general, but not specifically the curl). Just curious.

[shanniesue2]

idk... I'm really just going by what Lorraine Massey advises in her Curly Girl book, which is that if you really want to enhance your curls you shouldn't ever use heat on them. Maybe damage is the wrong term... and she did put in layers, but she also combed out the curls before cutting, so I think she just didn't get the layers cut according to how my waves fall...

[JessicaS]

I am sure she missed the layers. Is there anyone in your area that knows how to cut curly hair?

[SunshineJ]

And that is why I cut my hair myself for years - few people really seem to know how to cut with the curl, and I figured I couldn't do any worse! If you can find someone who knows how, I'd go to them and see if they could recut it, maybe only taking off 1/4 of an inch or so, to cut it correctly so it will curl again.