I've been wanting get wavy/loose curly hair with heatless curls for a while, but being busy this semester and being worried that it would turn out horrible, I never got around to doing it. When I did get around to doing it the other day, it actually turned out alright, so I thought I'd share. I used a method called 'bantu knots'. This method creates tighter curls, which I think would work better on my medium hair length. For long hair, I recommend the two bun method, which I used last year for a few months. I used Annalee's tutorial from annaleeandjesse's youtube channel, which worked out pretty well for me.
Generally, I just keep my hair in the knots until its fully dry; you can either sleep on it and take it out in the morning, or just keep in all day. I chose to keep it in all day so when I removed it before bed, the the curls would drop slightly overnight, resulting in looser curls.
First off, let's start off with towel dried hair. Your hair needs to be damp for the curls to set; if you're starting with dry hair, just dampen your hair by spraying some water onto it. I procrastinated a bit so my hair is close to being dry here, but it was still damp enough to work with.
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| Hey there, good lookin' |
Now grab a section of your hair, I started with my fringe, and twist. So generally, when curling hair, you want to twist the front parts away from your face, but twisting my hair away from my face seems to have the inverse effect here. So, my theory is, if you want the hair to twist away from your face, twist it towards your face.
Twist it so that the knot wraps into a spiral and secure it with a hair tie. Scrunchies are the most comfortable to use and leave less of a kink, but all of mine have disappeared. The tighter the bun, the tighter the curl.
Tada! One down, four more to go.
I decided to do 5 knots: one for my fringe and two on either side of my head (front and back)
And now we wait, looking a bit like Crazy Eyes from Orange is the New Black.
When your hair is sufficiently dry it, let it out and gently separate the curls.
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| Just after removing the hair ties. |
I flipped my head upside down and roughly shook out the curls with my fingers to separate them.
I now discovered that because of the inverse twisting effect I mentioned
earlier, I had a fringe was twisting towards my face, which looked a bit
weird, but too late now.
So, the next morning, the curls had settled down a bit.
I pinned the front sections back to hide the awkward strands in front.
And you're done. Yay!
Messy waves/curls for everyone.
