If you follow me on Instagam then you probably already know this, but MY CURLS ARE BACK!! I took out my sew-in last week and after about an hour and a half of detangling and many tears I was able to see my curls again. We did it Monday evening after work and I was a bit hesitant since it usually takes my hair about 24 hours to fully dry, but decided to do a wash ‘n go and use my blow dryer and diffuser so I wouldn’t have to go to work with wet hair. Wash ‘n go’s haven’t always been my friends, especially since they typically require me to put some kind of gel in my hair, and the gel would either leave a gray cast or get flaky. And if it didn’t do either of those the wash ‘n go wouldn’t last longer than 2 days.
That was NOT my experience with this one.
I’ve been using the olive oil one for years, I even referred to it as “old faithful”, but I would never use it for a wash ‘n go longer than 2 days. I thought about using it to get by last week, but I stopped in the beauty supply store on the way home because I was on a mission to find a specific gel. Now I’d heard great things about Eco Style’s new line of gels. Their black castor and flaxseed gel was getting all kinds of rave reviews online and people have been able to find it everywhere, but the elusive gold gel was hard to come by in stores. Eco Style sells it online, but I wasn’t willing to fork over $18 for a 16oz container, and as a last resort I saw it on Amazon for $12. That was still more than I wanted to spend on a 16oz container, but I would’ve bitten the bullet and bought it there if I had to. I hadn’t spent more than $8 for a container of gel in the past and didn’t plan on starting that now. The natural hair goddesses were on my side on Monday, I was able to not only find both the gold and black castor & flaxseed gels in my local beauty supply store, but I was able to get them for prices I was used to paying. In fact, in my local supply store the gold gel was a third of what it cost on Eco Style’s website.
I’d seen clips of beauty bloggers sharing first impressions of the gel as well as their own results using it and I was excited to try it out that night. One piece of advice I heard repeated in numerous videos was that I didn’t need to put a lot of different products in my hair to get and keep defined curls. I took that advice to heart and ended up just washing and conditioning it like I normally would, detangling it and then just coating my curls in the gold gel (and I do mean coating them) and blow drying them using my diffuser.
(left side – damp hair, right side – diffused/dry hair)
(fully diffused and dry hair)
I loved the results!! The gel itself doesn’t feel like the traditional gel, it feels a bit more like a moisturizing crème. It smells AMAZING, kind of sweet like but not overwhelming and it was able to define and hold my curls without leaving my hair crunchy. And when I say it held my curls I mean it. Here’s a picture of me from Saturday evening before I went to the Selena tribute concert in town.
Now I know that everyone isn’t going to have the same experience, we have different curl types, but I will continue to use this for my wash ‘n go’s because my 3c/4b curls love it! This gold gel might dethrone the olive oil one as my holy grail gel, and I’ll let y’all know which one wins after I try the black castor & flaxseed oil one!