Bern Morley Friday 17 February 2012 1:22pm

• (33)
• (21)
• (166)

This is a sponsored post brought to you by Dove

The life of a curly haired person can be a lonely one. I’ll just wait here quietly while you get your tiny violins ready.

Seriously though, I was born with white, curly hair. Wait, no,  back up, I was born with NO HAIR but by the age of 2, it was abundantly clear I was going to be the only white girl in Queensland with an afro.

The problem with my hair isn’t so much that it’s curly, I share that genetic “blessing” with hundreds of thousands of people. No, my constant source of annoyance is that I’ve got this almighty and unforgiving frizz that accompanies it.

When I was about 10 years old, I gained underground access to my first ever Dolly magazine. This coincided with my mother offering me fifty bucks to chop my hair off as she “liked me better that way”. Firstly, I’m not even going to get into how questionable it is to offer your daughter money to look more like a guy, but I will say this, I am easily bought and with my confidence that the short haired model in Dolly and I would be total twins, I accepted the challenge.

Short story, I ended up looking like a brunette Ronald McDonald. That’s also the long story.

There were no defined curls, I did NOT look like Molly Ringwald in 16 Candles and I can tell you this much – Fifty bucks can never buy you enough Chicken Twisties to take away the pain of being called a boy by your school Principal.

As time went on, my hair grew back. Slowly, painfully and now, with added Frizz! Oh how I would look lovingly at straight golden hair and jealously think they had it all, meanwhile I was making my own personal contribution to eroding the Ozone layer with the copious amounts of Final Net I was applying, desperate for some kind of control.

Then came 1988 and a little golden haired young lady came along that changed the hair landscape of my adolescence.  I’m talking about Kylie and the spiral perm. That’s right, all of a sudden – curly hair was a thing!  A good thing. Oh but wait, frizzy hair was still out. So too, I quickly discovered, spiral perms for people that already HAD curly hair.

As I got older I grew complacent with my hair. Forgetting how abominable it could look until I was handed a photo and wondered who the wild woman of Borneo was standing at the back and then realised with horror,  ‘That’s Me!”

It would be around that time, I would make the pilgrimage to some massive warehouse that sold every hair solution known to man and explain to the bored 17 year old that I needed to calm my hair RIGHT. DOWN. She’d give me the once over, give her gum a couple of chews and the motion for me to follow her.

She would then stand me in front of no less than 126 products and convince me that I needed the most expensive one. Plus the matching shampoo and conditioner. I, like a deranged puppy would almost pump her leg in gratitude and take it home, dreaming of manageable tresses. In my mind, I too was about to become one of those people who always looked effortless, stylish and most importantly, not like they’d just been spat out of the eye of a particularly nasty hurricane.

Did reality match up to the promise? Rarely. Either I’d end up with hair that looked somewhat damp and unkempt or worse, constantly greasy. There seemed to be no solution. No easy one anyway.

After asking other people from the frizzy/curly haired tribe, I have finally learnt the secret. Prevention. Better than the cure. You know that old Chestnut? I’ve learned that a lot of my woes come from lack of maintenance. In other words, I have to look after it, feed it and not expect it to behave for me when I’m not disciplining it myself.

Dove Nutri-Oil Serum

The best product I have discovered that not only tames my unruly, frizzy hair but also leaves it smooth and enhances its shine, has been oil. Out of all the products I’ve tried, and believe me, I have tried them ALL, I have found oil works the best.

So yeah, there are days when it still looks as though I’ve just walked backwards out of an argument with a washing machine on spin cycle but mostly, mostly, I’m happy to call it mine.

The new Dove Nutri-Oil Serum is part of the new Dove Nourishing Oil Care Range, formulated with weightless nutri-oils to smooth away roughness and frizz, giving women everywhere beautiful, finger-runnable hair. Absorbing from the moment it is applied, the hair shaft is deeply nourished with no greasy residue.

This post is sponsored by Dove. Comments on this post are just for this post. If you want to talk about the IDEA of sponsored posts or the choice of advertisers please click here. We will be reading all those comments too for feedback.

What are your curly/frizzy/tricky hair solutions?