A Hairstylist’s Simple Guide to Blow Drying Hair

Does your hair not do what you want it to do? Do you want more volume? Or for your straight hair to get some texture? Read on to learn more about why I heavily suggest using a blow dryer to solve these issues.

What is blowdrying?

So people may not know this but there are actually two ways to style one's hair.

Wet Setting and Heat Setting.

Wet setting uses water and product to manipulate the hair, and you allow it to air dry in position as a way to style the hair. (Learn more about wet setting and how it is more suited for wavy/curly hair here.)

Heat setting is using heat to manipulate the hair, allowing you to direct it in ways that wet setting cannot. It goes without saying that a hair dryer is needed for this method. Hot tools like flat or curl irons can also be used to manipulate the hair with heat, mainly to temporarily change the texture of the hair.

We're gonna focus on the hair dryer for the remainder of this article.

Why blowdry?

So if we can throw product in our hair and let it set on it's own, why would we really need to use heat?

Wet setting is pretty limited to how your hair naturally wants to work. Hair doesn't want to stand up or change texture on it's own, no matter how much product we can throw into it. That's where blow drying comes in.

With heat, you can manipulate the hair in more ways and it can offer whole new style options for you. This is because heat is able to open up the cuticles of the hair strands, essentially weakening the bonds. As the hair cools down, the bonds strengthen back up but in the new shape you have created.

This is why you can get more volume when blow drying and you can also add waves into straight hair just by applying heat. In fact, I personally think that if you have straight hair and know how to properly blow dry your hair, you have the potential to achieve a myriad of different styles. Straight hair does not have to be flat and boring!

This hairstyle’s volume could only be achieved by the use of the blow dryer.

How do I blow dry?

Now, this ranges from super simple to super methodical, depending on the look you are trying to achieve. However, I would suggest the following approach that includes two main stages.

Global Direction and Local Texture.

Prior to blow drying you want to add a product that can help control the hair or enhance certain properties. Such as a salt spray for texture or a tonic spray for thickening. As well, I recommend using a low to medium heat setting, as high heat runs the risk of burning your scalp or damaging your hair. A low speed setting will allow you more control, while a high speed setting gives you power in directing the hair.

When you apply heat, you want to focus first on the overall (or global) direction of the hair. Are you wearing it forward? Backwards? Parted? Once decided, you will want to focus on blow drying the hair into that direction.

Keep in mind that hair has a natural growth pattern that may fight you. You can determine this while the hair is wet, by combing it around. Does it lay flat, or does it kick outwards? When it lays flat, that means it is following its natural growth. When it kicks out, it means you are going against the natural growth.

For certain haircuts, where the hair isn't long enough to manipulate fully, you will want to follow the growth pattern in the first stage of blow drying. This is how you'll be able to maintain a good shape without any hair sticking out of place.

So for example, if you have a short haircut and want to wear a quiff, the overall direction of your hair would go forward, and then at the fringe (very front) is when you'll be able to direct it upwards away from the face. The common misconception is that because you want the front to be up and away from your face, you'll blow dry all the hair away from your head, but that fights the natural growth and causes the hair to spike out.

Once you've dealt with the global direction, you may find that your hair looks the way you want to and no further steps are needed. If so then you can skip this next stage.

However, for some, local details/texture is needed to get the hair to appear styled. The degree to which you'll be adding texture is up to you and your final look. For a textured look, like a crop haircut: You will want to scrunch the hair as you apply heat, hold the scrunch and let the hair cool before releasing your fingers.

For a voluminous pompadour kind of style, you'll want to use a brush to help pull the hair, creating tension and applying heat to the hair so that it starts building height upon itself.

You will only be able to emphasize as much texture as the haircut allows for, so if your hair wasn't cut with that in mind, it may cause you to struggle with getting the results you're trying to achieve no matter how much scrunching you try.

After you've added texture, your hair should be in good shape. So much so, that product is almost optional.  You can use something like a clay or wax to enhance the hold of the hair or even add shine to it. This will keep things in place, but understand that the look was achieved first by blowdrying.

In conclusion, blow drying is a form of heat setting the hair so that it can be manipulated into a style, whether that means adding volume or texture that wouldn't be possible by wet setting alone. The recommended steps are to dry the overall head of hair first in a direction that allows it to sit nicely and then fine tune the style with local texture and detail work.