Everything I know about hair

From modelling in a shampoo commercial to taking care of my waves and curls daily.

✺ ✺ ✺ I've had a love-hate relationship with my hair for the longest time. As a teenager and well into my twenties, I felt like it was just too much, too thick, too wild, and just impossible to style properly. I'd often just tie it up, plait it, or on the occasional good hair day, let it hang loose, hoping it wouldn't puff up into a frizzy mess. 

Then, in 2014, Dove Hair Care picked me, of all people, for a commercial, celebrating the very volume and thickness I'd struggled with, in a campaign featuring “real women”. They flew me out to South Africa for a week, just so I could flip my hair in slow-mo for the cameras. The whole experience was absolutely surreal. You can still watch various versions of the ad online on YouTube.

@inesfress

For a follow-up gig with the same brand (here on Vimeo), I had my hair bleached and dyed strawberry blonde. It was a pretty big change considering I'd only experimented with colouring once before. It took a good 2-3 years to get fully back to my natural shade, a kind of dark blonde with lighter streaks which is what I am wearing now. Featuring in a global advertising campaign for Dove didn't transform my view on my hair overnight, but it sure left an impact as it was a massive boost to my confidence. 

Becoming strawberry blonde for Dove in 2014. I was 24 and about to move to London. | @inesfress

Soon after, I moved to London to start my journalism master at City University, and that ad followed me everywhere. Classmates spotted me in magazines. People recognised me from the TV ad that was broadcasting in the US, UK and Canada on repeat. They invariably mentioned and complimented my hair. It made me realise that my "unmanageable" mane, which I'd spent the better part of my teens and early twenties trying to tame with flat iron straighteners (and okay, sometimes an actual iron, but let's not dwell on that!!), was actually something I should be proud of or, at least, like. 

Funnily enough, just a few weeks into my new life in London, I found myself at a random hairdresser getting bangs cut in. I guess I was trying to distance myself from the "model" image, which felt a bit awkward to me, and step into the "journalist" role I was aspiring to at the time. Here’s a photographic evidence of this drastic hair transformation:

Same hair era, circa 2014-2015: An impossible to style fringe, bleached hair & questionable style. | @inesfress

What bangs, getting my hair bleached, and the modelling side-hustle I carved in the decade following that experience, taught me, is that good hair doesn’t happen by magic. That is especially true if you have wavy or curly textures. The tips I’m about to share won’t suit everyone but I think there is an underlying wisdom that you can take with you on your journey to healthy hair.

Below I’ll share pretty much everything I know about this topic, give away inspiration I learned from hairdressers over the years, and round up some of my favourite tools and products to achieve different results.