Attempting Heatless Paper Towel Curls

One of the reasons I want to grow my hair long is to curl them. I've always admired long and curled hair idk why, it's just very beautiful.

Some throwbacks...

I can't recall if I ever talked about it on my blog, but I tried heatless curls in the past; a couple of times with foam rollers, and I believe one time with socks. I always felt so-so with the results of both methods.

January 2013:

My first time trying heatless curls, using foam rollers from Walmart. I remember not being happy with the results.

I don't remember the exact length of my hair at that time, I think it was tailbone, or between tailbone and classic. Though now that I look at the picture, I think the curls actually look fine?! Sure the top of my head is flat and some curls are weird and thin-looking, but these can be fixed somehow – which I didn't know at the time. Also, I was flabbergasted at how short my hair was when curled and I hated it.

August 2016:

The foam rollers in this picture are the same as the one from 2013.

Btw, I don't really recommend these, there are better products on the market today.

I still don't really like how the curls turned out. Most of them have a weird shape and my hair looks thinner, from the middle to the ends. I remember my hair was very damaged during this period, so I understand why the curls wouldn't look their best. Maybe they could've improved with a brush to soften them though.

August 28th 2021

During my quarantine, I finally decided to make heatless curls with paper towels.

Let's see how it went. ( ´ ▽ ` ๑)

I got the idea from a video by Haartraum. Her video seems to focus on heatless curls using Jumbo Curlers. However, at 6:25 in the video, her friend is seen with paper towels and there's a quick demo of using them to curl your hair.

I didn't have a satin cap or scarf to put over my hair, so I just let it be.

Making the curls...

I used 23 paper towels for my hair.

Making the curls was a tedious job. After the first few ones, I got bored of having to roll a paper towel each time.

At last, all of my hair has been wrapped.

..

Front and back of my head.

I didn't follow any "curl pattern" which is why it's so messy and asymmetrical.

Personally, I didn't find the curls comfortable to sleep on. One would think that because of the thinness of the paper towels, it would be fine to sleep on these, but it wasn't.

The morning after...

First, this is what my hair looked like when I got out of bed:

So many flyaways!

And the result:

Note that even after two trims in the past months (against my will), my ends still look ratchet. I'm not sure what to do, but another trim is definitely not considered this time. At this point, I think I'm just gonna let my hair grow until it reaches a little bit past my knees, and then I'll look into my ends.

To add to that, because I didn't always start a curl from the tip of the strand (arms too short/hair too long), some curls' ends ended up a bit weird. 🥴

..

High luminosity and normal lighting

Besides the ends, I think the curls look pretty okay considering that I totally went completely freestyle with the paper towels. I was expecting something worse.

The ends  →  (╯ಥ□ಥ）╯︵ ┻━┻

The same day, in the afternoon...

Fast forward in the afternoon, the curls were still pretty much as tight as when I had unravelled them in the morning. So I decided to oil them with Moroccanoil and brush them lightly to relax the curls.

I shouldn't have done that. Even though I was quite gentle, there was a lot of frizz.

I find that my hair in the above pic appears thick, while it's actually pretty thin:

From the back – I preferred the tighter curls more:

..

High luminosity and normal lighting

I got some of these knots. x_x

The aftermath. Paper towel turds.

After trying heatless curls with paper towels, I will not use this method again.

Granted, the paper towels surely curled my hair, and the curls lasted (my Asian hair tends to be incapable of holding a single curling iron curl). Also, they'd look very cute styled in a half updo or a ponytail.

However, it wasn't easy to wrap a hair strand around a paper towel from the tip, and the paper towels are quite uncomfortable to sleep with. Furthermore, you end up with a pile of them that you need to make use of.

All this to say that the experience wasn't entirely bad, but the tiresome making of the curls and the uncomfortable sleep just weren't worth the result. I admit my hair is on the longer side which explains the weirdly curled ends, so I guess it's just not the right method for my hair.

Thankfully, other techniques seem to work as well and don't have these drawbacks, such as the bathrobe curls that I still haven't tested with my hair.