The Best Time Hair Plopping Made Me Look Like A Chaos Muppet

I can mark my life in hair products. First, there was nothing. Then, Frizz Ease. The hair serum was gloopy and I hadn’t yet mastered that “comb through your hair” instruction, so it only served to turn the top layer of my hair into a shiny protective coating while the rest of my hair expanded from underneath. It was a start though. Later came creams, gels, my mom or I coming home shouting that we’d found a new product that was bound to finally give us light, bouncy, soft, big-but-not-too-big curls that never tangled and never frizzed no matter how humid it was outside. In my bathroom lay the bodies of products long forgotten.

Now, I’ve put myself as a 3A-3B on the hair type scale. I use Shea Moisture conditioners and a Miss Jessie’s Leave-In conditioner and “Multi-Cultural Curls.” They’ve been great, but so have lots of other products, in that they keep things in control. But I foolishly hold out for that one product or technique that will change it all. I thought I found it in “Hair Plopping.”

A Buzzfeed article about the practice came up on Twitter Sunday morning, though the practice has been around for a long time. The gist is you apply whatever products you’d normally use in your hair, flip your hair onto an old t-shirt and wrap it around your hair until it’s sort of positioned exactly on top of your head, and then wait until it dries. I work from home and don’t have to worry about leaving the house like this, so it seemed perfect. “Once your hair is dry, unwrap your T-shirt and SEE YOUR BEAUTIFUL CURLS,” Buzzfeed told me. I wanted to believe them.

Yesterday morning I dutifully showered, then grabbed an old purple long-sleeved shirt (for easier maneuvering, as the article suggested) and plopped up my hair. I waited about four hours for things to dry, but I spent the whole time dreadfully impatient, probably because I’m a #millennial. I Googled the practice and came across endless photos of girls in effortless curls, .gifs of them cascading down their necks upon release from their t-shirt prison, needing not a single adjustment. It me, I thought, curls me. I could barely pay attention to anything that came up, including a phone interview I was conducting. I just started at my wrapped-up head in the mirror and envisioned my future.

Finally it was time, and I unraveled my t-shirt turban.

What. The hell.

Do you see my bangs in this photo? They will not go down. They refuse. They have decided their true form is an artful nest you can buy on Etsy for $45 and display in your foyer. You cannot see here, but underneath all the hair directly around my scalp has somehow been pulled sleek and straight against my head, so that the curls shoot out and up, refusing to fall anywhere near my face. The back is now a pile of frizz.

As it dried it only expanded and frizzed more, I thought of the second time I smoked pot. The first time it just made me cough and my throat burn and I felt more nauseous than anything, but everyone chalked it up to that just being what happened the first time you smoke pot. The second time, I suffered a barrage of “tips.” I had to breathe deeper, or hold it in longer, or breathe out of my nose, or whatever nonsense some 17-year-old boys on a rooftop in SoHo were telling me. At the end of the night all the people I was with were high and I was decidedly not and I just sat on a couch in this stranger’s apartment, watching my friends become fascinated with a blanket, figuring there was something wrong with me.

I would smoke pot dozens of more times before I realized that I just don’t like it! It’s not my thing, and neither is hair plopping, and I could either try a hundred more times and convince myself that it’s my technique that’s wrong, or I could just accept that my hair does not plop. It’s cool, it does plenty of other things.