Research

Most curl products are built for a condition. Your life is not one condition.

You go outside, into air conditioning or heating, into a car, on a train or on your bike. The season turns. You fly somewhere with completely different weather. Your hair changes after a pregnancy, menopause or the year the grays showed up.

I have spent more than 25 years testing hundreds of products across dozens of countries and every stage of my own life. None of them held up across all of it.

What I found

Before I started Field Study Beauty, I wanted to know whether other people had the same problems I did. So I surveyed 28 wavy and curly haired individuals across the country. What came back surprised me enough that I kept digging.

• Products built for humidity usually fail in dry air, and products built for dry climates tend to swell in humidity. But most people move through several conditions in a single day. Nobody in the survey was asked about weather or climate. Some of them raised it anyway.
• People's hair changed on them unexpectedly through age, time, hormones, etc. And when it did, the products stopped working. Nothing they were doing had changed.
• Over 60 percent were unhappy with how their hair looked by the end of the day. Frizz, or fallen flat, or entirely dependent on the weather. Most people got two days before starting over completely.

Some had stopped trying altogether. They were not looking for a better product. They had given up on the idea that they could wear their hair wavy or curly.

I couldn't find what I needed, so I created it for us.

What I am still learning

While creating Field Study custom products, I tested the formulas from desert and mountain dry to coastal and city humid, through sun, sweat, salt water, wind, color, travel, hats, helmets, perimenopause, and going white.

That is a good start. It is not an answer.

What I want to know now is how they work for you, and what you have learned about your own hair. Altitude. Hard water. A humid summer and a dry winter in the same city. Somewhere I have never been.

If you try them, tell me what happened. Take the Climate Curl Quiz, which feeds directly into what I am learning next. Or write to me at info@fieldstudybeauty.com.

Help us all be more knowledgeable.

Better. Not More.

Take the Climate Curl Quiz →