Stephanie Smith Facebook ad: “We make hair time fun again”

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1895779567790652

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Hair Care

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My daughter cried every morning for two years and I genuinely thought it was something wrong with me. She'd see the detangling brush come out and her shoulders would drop in this small, defeated way that kept me up at night. I'd try to be gentle. I'd warm the spray bottle in my hands first so it wouldn't be cold on her scalp. I'd let her pick the brush. I'd sing the song from Frozen that she liked. It didn't matter. The knots were the knots, and the brush had to go through them. So we'd both end up crying by 7:40 and I'd drop her at nursery with red eyes and tell the teacher she'd had a rough morning. My hair has been pin-straight my entire life. So has my mum's. So has my sister's. There's nobody in my family with curls, and then Mia came out with these ringlets that looked like they belonged on a Renaissance painting, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with them. I bought every product. I asked the chemist. I asked the lady at the salon who cuts my hair. I asked Google. None of it helped. I was starting to wonder if I was just bad at this in some fundamental way that the universe had decided to make obvious by giving me a child whose hair I couldn't manage. This is the part of the story where, if this were one of those Instagram ads, I'd tell you I was scrolling at midnight and stumbled on some miracle product that was 90% off and it worked overnight. But that's not what happened. What happened was a Tuesday afternoon in the supermarket hair aisle, where I was standing with two detanglers in my hands, reading the back of one and then the back of the other and then the first one again, when a woman about my age cleared her throat behind me. She had a little girl on her hip. The little girl had a head of tight, defined curls and was happily chewing on her own thumb. The woman had the same hair. She said, "Sorry, I don't want to be that person. But neither of those is actually going to do what you need." My first instinct was to mumble "oh thanks, haha" and push my trolley away. Because honestly I was annoyed at myself. Annoyed I'd been standing in this aisle for forty minutes. But I was so tired of the battles every morning. I managed to speak. What came out was, "My daughter has curly hair. Why is it so hard to manage?" Her name was Steph. We ended up at the café at the front of the supermarket, with our respective trolleys parked next to the table and her daughter Sienna colouring on a serviette, and we talked for almost an hour. I told her what our mornings looked like. I told her about the crying. About the brush. About the fact that I'd tried SIX different products. About the photo I'd seen of myself with Mia at her dance recital the year before, where Mia's hair looked frizzy and unmanaged and I'd felt a small private shame about it, like I'd let her down in front of people. Steph listened the way you listen when you've heard something before. Not in a way that made me feel small. In a way that made me feel understood. Then she said "Can I tell you what nobody told me? It might make you a bit uncomfortable but I promise it's worth it." I said yes. She said there were three things I was almost certainly doing that were quietly making everything worse and that none of them were my fault, because everything I'd been taught about hair was for the wrong kind of hair. The first one was the brushing. I was brushing Mia's hair dry every morning. Not because I didn't care. Because I didn't have an hour to stand in the bathroom doing some elaborate styling routine before nursery. It's how I do my own hair. Wet it the night before, brush it in the morning, out the door. Steph said the problem is straight hair and curly hair aren't even the same shape. She picked up the little stirrer from her coffee. "Straight hair is like this. Round, smooth, the brush slides off it." Then she picked up a ribbon that was tied around Sienna's wrist. "Curly hair is like this. Flat. Twisted. The brush doesn't slide off it, the brush catches on every single turn." She said when you drag a brush through a dry ribbon, you're not detangling anything. You're snapping it at the turns. The crying wasn't Mia being difficult. It was the brush doing what brushes do to ribbons. I had to put my coffee down for a second. Steph kept going. The second thing was the towel. I was using the same cotton bath towels we used on everything. Wrap her hair up, rub it dry, send her off to get dressed. Steph said cotton towels rough up the cuticle of curly hair and shatter the curl pattern. That "frizzy after the bath" look I'd been fighting for two years? That wasn't her hair. That was the towel. A soft cotton t-shirt or a microfibre wrap, gently squeezed, gives you a completely different child. The third thing was the washing. I was washing Mia's hair every two days. Because that's what felt clean. That's what I'd do with my own. Steph said curly hair is naturally drier than straight hair. The shape of the strand means the oils don't travel down it the way they do on straight hair. When you wash it every two days you're stripping out the oil the hair needs, and then the hair frizzes out trying to compensate, and then you blame the hair. Twice a week. That was it. I sat there in the café holding my coffee and feeling like an idiot, except Steph kept saying, "It's not your fault. Nobody tells us. I had to learn from my sister and she had to learn from a hairdresser, and we figured it out the slow, hard way." That part stuck with me. Because what Steph was actually saying, underneath the brushing and the towel and the washing, was that there's a whole language for this kind of hair and the only way you learn it is if someone in your life happens to speak it. If your mum has curls, she teaches you. If you have a sister or an auntie or a cousin with curls, they teach you. If you're a straight-haired mum and your daughter has curls, no one teaches you. You just stand in the supermarket aisle for forty minutes wondering why you're failing at something that's supposed to be instinctive. Steph asked me what I was using. I showed her one of the bottles in my trolley. She turned it around and pointed at the ingredients list. Sulfates. Drying alcohols. Hydroxides. She said, "Here's the bit that took me ages to figure out. I thought I was doing it right too. I bought the curly hair shampoo. I bought the kids' shampoo. I bought the ones with the cartoon characters on them that said gentle on the front." She tapped the back of the bottle. "They all have the same harsh stuff in them. The label on the front says one thing, the ingredients on the back say another. They're not really formulated for curly kids' hair. They're formulated to be cheap to make and to smell nice. The sulfates strip the oil out, the alcohols dry the strand, the hydroxides change the pH. On adult straight hair, you get away with it. On a five-year-old with curls, the hair just gives up." That was the second time I had to put my coffee down. I'd been buying her hair products in good faith for two years. And I'd been damaging her hair in good faith for two years. I asked Steph what she used. She kind of laughed and said it was a bit of a story. She said she'd gone through every brand on the shelf, the same way I had, and got so frustrated at one point that she'd called her sister and said someone needs to actually make this. Someone who has a curly kid. Someone who's lived it. Because nothing on the shelves was actually it. Her sister told her about a small brand a friend had mentioned. A mum who'd started making her own stuff in her kitchen because her daughter's curls were getting wrecked by everything she tried. She'd worked with a chemist to take out all the things that were drying the hair out, and built a little kids' range around it. It's called Define Curls. Steph said she'd tried it expecting it to be like the others. The first wash day, Sienna didn't cry. She thought it was a coincidence. The second wash day, Sienna didn't cry. By the third week, hair time was something Sienna actually asked to do. She said the unlock was two things. The first was what wasn't in it. No sulfates, no parabens, no drying alcohols, no hydroxides. The second was the smell. Whoever had formulated it had clearly understood that if the kid doesn't like the smell, the kid doesn't sit still, and if the kid doesn't sit still, none of it works. Sienna heard her mum say the word smell and looked up from her colouring. "Mum my hair smells like the beach." It does, Steph said. I know. I ordered the kids' kit that night. I'm not going to tell you it changed everything in a week, because that's the kind of thing people write in ads, and the truth is messier than that. The first week, Mia still cried. Some of that was probably habit. Some of it was that her hair had been dry and damaged for two years and one bottle of curl cream wasn't going to undo all of that in seven days. In the second week, I started noticing little things. She sat still for slightly longer. The brush moved through her hair more easily on the second wash day than the first. She asked me what the bottle smelled like and then asked if she could smell it again. By the end of the first month, she'd stopped flinching when the brush came near her hair. The morning I knew something had really changed was a Saturday in October. We were in the bathroom together and I was working the curl cream through her hair the way Steph had shown me, with my hands, scrunching upward, and Mia looked at herself in the mirror and said, very quietly: "My hair looks pretty today." I didn't say anything for a second because I didn't trust my voice. She'd never said that before. Not once in six years. I want to be careful here, because I'm writing this for other mums and I don't want to overstate anything. It wasn't just the products. It was that I'd stopped doing three things that were quietly wrecking her hair. It was the silk pillowcase Steph had told me to get for under a tenner. It was that Mia could see me trying. Several things shifted at once, the way they do when you finally have the right information. But the products mattered. What was in them had been chosen by someone who actually cared about curly kids' hair. What wasn't in them had been left out for a reason. Mia's six now. She does most of her own hair on the weekends. She's started telling other kids at school that her curls are her favourite thing about herself. That's the only review that's ever mattered to me. If you're a mum reading this and you've been crying in your kitchen because your daughter cries every morning, I want to say a few things to you carefully. I don't know your daughter. I don't know what you've already tried, or where you're at, or whether your situation is the same as mine was. I'm not telling you Define Curls fixed everything. I'm telling you that I stopped doing three things, started using products that weren't drying her hair out, and the mornings got quieter. If any of this sounds like your house, the Define Curls Kids range is what I wished someone had handed me when Mia was 18 months old. A detangler that actually glides. A curl cream that moisturises without being heavy. A soft brush that doesn't snap the strands. And a guide called Wash Day Decoded that explains every single thing nobody had ever told me. No sulfates. No parabens. No drying alcohols. A smell your daughter will actually like. I keep one on hand for friends now. I've given a few away in the last year to other straight-haired mums who looked at me at the school gate with that look I recognised. The one I had in the supermarket aisle, where you're holding two bottles in your hands and you don't know which one is the right one. The answer is usually neither of them. The answer is starting from scratch with the right information. That's all I have. I hope something in here was useful to you. I hope your mornings get quieter. I hope your daughter tells you, one Saturday morning in October, that her hair looks pretty today. That's the only thing any of this is for.

Where the ad sends people

definecurls.co.uk

We make hair time fun again

The complete curl routine for her hair. Designed for mums with different hair than their daughters. 4 steps, under 10 minutes, no curl expertise needed!