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Challenge: I Tried Curl Formers and Here’s What I Thought

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Carleton chapter.

For months now, I’ve been repeatedly watching curly girl videos on Youtube trying to find the best way to maintain my frizzy, dry, unmanageable hair. After several attempts at trying different (and expensive) products, I thought I’d found the one. Curl formers have been all the rage in the curly girl community recently and after watching several curl former trial videos, I bit the bullet and ordered some off Amazon. 

I tried it for the first time and here’s what I found out: 

You can’t use it on sopping wet hair 

I tried it right after I got out of the shower and although I was able to still get some sort of foundation to my curls, it didn’t form as well as I wanted to when my hair was really wet. Either let it air dry for 30 minutes until it’s damp or dry it carefully with a cotton t-shirt. 

I took the curl formers out too early

I learned this the hard way both times I tried it. Your curls will not stay if you take them out too early before they completely dry. My hair was still a little bit damp when I took them out and it caused my hair to frizz and flatten. The finished product should be completely dry. 

It wasn’t as expensive as I thought it was going to be 

When I went to go check out the different options Amazon had for curl formers, there were some with high prices, and others with lower ones. This made it really hard for me to choose which ones to buy. But, Amazon pointed out the best seller at about $30, which sounded reasonable to me. 

They can hurt a little bit 

There are two ways the curl formers hurt my head. The first when I was trying to pull the hair through the former, it got tangled and I had to yank my hair out to get it untangled. The second is actually after the process when you leave your hair to dry. Your hair is pulled so tightly by the formers that when it’s time to take them out, you have a headache. 

The colors indicate the direction you want your curls to dry

When I got my curlers, they came in two different colors: pink and yellow. The first time I put them in my hair, I didn’t realize the color meant the direction the former will dry your curls. If you’re looking for a consistent curl pattern, it’s important to split the hair and use one color for each side.

If you’ve been dying to try these curl formers, I do recommend them. They can be an easy, fast and damage-free way to get the curls you want on a budget. Take my bad experiences into consideration when trying them because you don’t want to spend all that time and put in all that work, just to end up with a bad result. If you’re a curly girl like me, this may be a good way to get those soft and consistent curls. 

Mariam was President at Her Campus Carleton circa 19/20. She's a puppy lover and strives to be Mindy Kaling one day. Hopefully in five years you can find her working on the next most popular true crime series. Bachelor of Journalism '20 - Carleton University