Sponsored by Suave
How many of you have ever felt personally victimized by humidity? Living in New York with naturally curly hair (I know, why do I do this to myself?) it’s a daily reality for me to have decent-looking curls—until I step outside and Mother Nature has its way with my hair. Because I don’t enjoy looking like Monica Geller in Barbados year-round, you can bet that I’ve tried basically every product on the market and every “life hack” to fix dry, frizzy hair. And I’m here to impart my wisdom on you, because I’m generous like that. So here are some strategies and products that actually work and will give you sleek, smooth hair all summer long, even when it’s so humid outside you feel like you’re walking through a cloud. And the best part is none of these methods cost like, a million dollars because we know you’re not made of money.
1. Don’t Wash Your Hair Every Day
Look, I know. Clean hair is great, but let’s be real, it’s a lot of work to style it every day, and by over-washing, you’re stripping your hair of natural oils it needs. If you have dry hair, it’ll be more likely to frizz up, especially if you’re also causing heat damage by blow-drying, straightening, or curling every day. In the summer, you’re probably also exposing your hair to chlorine, salt water, and sun, all of which cause drying and frizz, so try to only wash once or twice a week at most. If you need a refresher in between, get a good dry shampoo to hold you over, like Suave Professionals Natural Refresh Dry Shampoo.
Suave Professionals Natural Refresh Dry Shampoo
2. Don’t Skip Conditioner
Conditioner is soooooo important to moisturizing your hair follicles, thus weighing it down so you don’t get swallowed alive by the humidity hair monster your dry af hair creates. Use conditioner with every wash, or if you insist on rinsing your hair every day even if you’re not shampooing, use it then too. The Suave Professionals Avocado + Olive Oil conditioner leaves dry, frizzy hair touchably soft and smooth. When used with the Avocado + Olive Oil shampoo and leave-in conditioner, your hair will stay smooth for up to three days and be protected from frizz—even in 95% humidity. Blessings.
Suave Professionals Avocado + Olive Oil Conditioner
3. Use Anti-Humidity Hairspray
To further combat frizz and keep it from ruining your blowout, spray your hair with an anti-humidity hairspray to seal it and keep it from expanding. When I lived in Texas, we used to use this horrible orange sticky gel to keep our hair from the humidity. My hair was sticky for like an entire 9 month period, but it wasn’t frizzy. Don’t be like me. After you finish styling, there are sprays like Suave Professionals Compressed Micro Mist Natural Smooth Hairspray, which is flexible and not sticky, and controls frizz for up for 48 hours.
Suave Professionals Natural Smooth Hair Spray
4. Brush Your Hair Often
Hey, remember the oil that we talked about not washing out every day? That is really important to your hair health, and ensuring it’s not being taken over by frizz. Brushing your hair doesn’t just remove tangles, it also spreads the oil from your scalp to the rest of your hair, keeping your ends from drying out. If you listen to me—WHICH YOU SHOULD—and stop washing your hair every day, then you want to continue to keep the oil moving away from your scalp so you don’t look like a wet rat on day three. Brush your hair twice a day at minimum to keep it shiny and frizz-free.
So the next time you’re strolling through the hair care aisle at your drug store, don’t sleep on Suave. Just because the price point is cheap doesn’t mean the products are—the opposite, actually. Just trust me on this. Suave is one of those things that’s not too good to be true.
Images: Ayo Ogunseinde / Unsplash; Suave (3)
Sponsored by Suave
Music festivals are definitely something everyone needs to attend at least like, once in their life to just get it out of their system. IDC if it’s a big fest in the desert or a lesser-known one in the middle of the woods―you just need to go to one. Buying the tickets, planning your outfit, and stocking up on one or two bottles (of sunscreen) are just a few things to get you prepared, but knowing the essentials you need to pack for survival are crucial. As it is, many items are restricted, so these are things you kinda need to plan ahead of time. Coming from someone who has honestly attended too many music festivals, you need to plan for sweltering heat, tons of body-to-body contact, deafening music, and exasperating lines for both the port-a-potty and refill stations. I’m about to make your life and packing situation a million times easier with this list of everything you could possibly need to get you through the day.
1. A Fanny Pack
For starters, you can’t bring your designer purse and honestly, you wouldn’t want to. You need a v small (but totally cute) bag like a fanny pack to hold all of your stuff—you know, your phone, charger, cash, cards, makeup… just the essentials.
2. Portable Charger
If you thought you spammed your social media now, just wait until you arrive at the festival. You’ll start to wonder if you should make a documentary with the amount of videos you’ll be taking. Clearly, you’ll need your iPhone battery to stay as alive as possible, at all times. We all have that one friend that runs away, so a dead phone won’t make the situation any better. Opt for a case that charges your phone, or a sleek battery pack. Portable chargers come in so many discreet forms these days that you have no excuse for toting around your entire charging cable.
3. Micro Mist Hairspray
You’ll be dancing and running around all day, which means you’ll need those perfect loose curls that you painstakingly spent over an hour curling to stay in place without looking crunchy or stiff. Suave’s Micro Mist Hairspray will help you achieve the perfect festival hair that will look amazing in all your Instas. It holds for up to 48 hours—that’s like watching #Beychella on repeat for 2 days straight. Yes please.
4. Natural Refresh Dry Shampoo
Dry shampoo is already your travel companion, so this one will only make you love it that much more. With the sun beating down on your head and hair, you don’t want to look like a grease monkey by noon—you need a dry shampoo that will give your hair a natural-looking clean. Like, you still have pictures to take. Made with 100% natural argan oil, this is your life-saver to make your strands feel refreshed all day long—even if you’re on day three without a shower.
5. Baby Wipes
So, yeah, there are no bathrooms. Instead, you’ll be faced with dozens of port-a-potty’s that you’ll have to hope are unoccupied and come with toilet paper. On the very likely chance that all TP is MIA, come prepared with flushable wipes and you’ll find yourself making plenty of festie besties.
Images: Shutterstock (3); Suave (2)
Sponsored by Suave
Anyone who’s been alive for more than, like, two seconds knows your hair can make or break your day. You might have been planning on staying in one night, but your hair is so good you make reservations with the girls to get dinner because you don’t want to waste a good hair day on your mirror. That’s why picking the right products for your hair is so important. But just because the latest celebrity to break out of the Disney Channel scene is in a shampoo commercial waving her five foot-long “hair” at you doesn’t mean you’ll look like her if you buy a bottle of the stuff. It’s kind of like how models on Instagram will take the “after” pic of their Transformation Tuesday post right in the morning when they wake up, and the “before” pic hours later after they’ve had a burrito. We all know what we see in photos isn’t always real, but sometimes the lengths people go to in order to appear perfect is a bit much, even for betches who love to exaggerate. Even some hair companies are using pretty crazy tactics that you’d never guess even were a thing in a million years.
Enter Suave, who just debuted a new campaign where they’re showing real results styled by the models themselves using only—you guessed it—Suave Professionals products. They’re cutting out the BS and shedding a light on the tricks other companies use, so you can be aware of what to look out for the next time you’re in the market for new mousse, hairspray, or dry shampoo.
Here are some of the most extra ways that some hair companies are trying to exaggerate the hair you see on screen.
1. Using A Green Screen To Create Flawless Hair
Some shampoo ads use green screens to create the look of flowy, shiny hair. Look, we’re not saying that the model doesn’t have significantly better hair than you to start with, but much like using any Facetuning app for your selfies, your results aren’t exactly #nofilter. You know who else uses green screens? Movies that have explosions and scenes that are too expensive or too unrealistic to actually shoot. So don’t feel bad when you can’t gather your hair in a ponytail and tie it in a knot around a barbell to show your friends how strong it is. Unless you’re literally Rapunzel, you don’t need that anyway.
It’s not just using a green screen either—there are often prop masters behind the scenes who use fishing poles or rods to move the hair from both sides to create that “waterfall effect.” You know the one. It looks great, but when you think about all the people behind the scenes, it’s kind of funny. Like those memes where the girl takes the perfect Insta in a field of roses, and then the zoomed-out shot reveals she’s really crouching in a bush while her friend taking the picture is lying on her back in the dirt, snapping away. It’s like, yeah, the end product looks great, but is it really worth all that effort?
2. Styrofoam Balls for Volume
2. Styrofoam Balls for VolumeIf you’ve ever seen a shampoo commercial where the model has volume that basically defies gravity, it’s not because she’s born that way, and it’s (probably) not because she’s using a Bump-It. Some companies actually pin Styrofoam balls on the back of models’ heads, and then cover the Styrofoam with hair to create the illusion of volume. #TheMoreYouKnow. If that’s not the definition of extra, I don’t know what is. Sure, these balls get the voluminous effect we all want, but I can’t help but feel like pinning a bunch of balls to the back of your head in real life is not exactly practical. It’s not like you can tell your date to only look at you from a 2D angle.
3. Extensions On Platform
3. Extensions On PlatformAnother trick used to make hair look good in commercials is literally using fake hair. That’s right, they’re selling you a product for your hair while using something that’s not even the person’s real hair, so just think about that the next time you wonder why your hair isn’t perfect at all times. You know those shots where a model will be lying down with her hair fanned out flawlessly all around her? That might not be her hair—it could just be extensions. I knew there was a reason I could never recreate that iconic “hair fanned out around my face in a series of heart shapes” pic.
Suave’s not using any of these tricks for their new campaign, which we can respect, since this was all getting a little try-hard.
Now, before you roll your eyes and say “yeah, yeah ok. but there is no way Suave makes my hair look as good as my $40 shampoo,” take our word for it—it works. And that’s coming from people who said they couldn’t sleep at night knowing one of the Bachelorette contestants was going to use Suave on their wedding day. We stand corrected, Suave.
