There are few things quite like the betrayal of a beauty product, especially one that you love. A few examples: Foundation that looks phenomenal, only to leave your skin a mess. Lipstick that’s the prettiest color you’ve ever seen, but migrates around and leaves you with Joker-face. Or, like we’re here to talk about today, hair gel.
Finding a curl gel that gives you beautiful definition is a triumph—but tons of good, even great curl gels pack a level of alcohol that dries out your hair over time, leaving it dehydrated even as nothing in your routine changes, says Ouidad stylist Jessica O’Brien. The situation is frustrating, so nip it in the bud with a moisturizing curl gel that doesn’t play games. Check out 13 of our all-time favorites ahead.
They’re up there, but my curls‘ greatest enemy isn’t humidity, breakage, or frizz. It’s not even an inexperienced hairstylist with a pair of blunt scissors (but a chill did just run down my spine). It’s sex. Either you tell your partner to watch themselves and miss out on the whole passionate, hands-in-your-hair, Outlander experience, or your hair doesn’t take priority, and you wake up the next morning with knots, tangles, and flattened curls that can only be fixed by a shower. But now, no longer.
A new crop of curl refresher sprays are hitting shelves that promise to take a broken up, frizzy curl, and get it back to a place that’s ready to see the light of day. We’ve seen options that have claimed to do this before. There have been hair oils that leave you greasy, water-based mists that leave you bedraggled, dry shampoos that soak up oil but don’t do anything for your curls, and dry conditioners that make your hair soft, but also do nothing to fix curl patterns. The closest thing to success, in my experience, has been spray oils, and while those are good, spray too much and you end up a greaseball.
But after testing all the options pouring into Glamour‘s beauty closet, I came up with three that hit the sweet spot between detangling and adding hydration, hold, and shine. On shelves, look for an aerosol formula, with oils included, but usually not at the top of the ingredient list (I found those ones are likely to weigh down your hair). I road-tested each with a hookup…or my best attempt at replicating the effects. As familiar as I am with The Apps, I am but one woman. So at some point, I had to fake it by rolling around on the couch to mimic the experience, touching my hair like an idiot man who has no idea how expensive hair products are. The reviewing process, you know how it is.
Read on for the three best curl refreshing sprays that held up to the challenge.
Shocker: trekking back to my place through subway heat and spring humidity doesn’t help my post-hookup curls, which usually have a few situations going on following a sleepover. There’s frizz, but also tangles large and small, and depending on how I slept, my curls’ volume is all over the place. I enjoy my hair most when the curl weight is distributed equally from top to bottom, i.e., when I’m a safe distance from triangle hair and the trademark poof at the bottom. Poof is hard to tackle, but tangles are more lethal—because once you untangle them, the curl definition is gone, and the bulk only grows.
On the frizz front, Living Proof has a new solution. The brand just released its No Frizz Instant De-Frizzer, which is a dry conditioning spray made from a blend of five oils and the brand’s “healthy hair molecule,” OFPMA. After ripping apart the most serious knots, I sprayed down my hair with a cloud of the De-Frizzer. My God, the shine—the difference was subtle but mighty. Especially where my hair was the size of my face on my right and a floating frizz cloud behind my left ear, it helped the curls fall back in line, albeit larger and in a looser curl than normal. It’s like a dry oil spray, without the fear of overdosing. So while it won’t put curls back together again, it’s a good option if you want to tamp your flyaways down.
Oribe surprised me here. After years of testing the so-called “best” luxury products, I’ve often found that the more expensive (and usually French-seeming) the brand, the least likely it is do to anything for my curls. So I went in with low expectations. At first, it felt like water and smelled like a Versailles kind of heaven. I was ready to scoff, but the Mystify turned it around and honestly blew my mind by achieving the impossible. It loosened my curl pattern and turned my typically bouncy curls into ropey, romantic twists. Back in the day (high school), this was my only goal. I literally bought a since-discontinued product for this very effect, back when I hated how big my hair was and wasn’t confident doing the rock ‘n’ roll hairflip, sorry-my-hair-is-in-your-space style you see before you on the left.
The Mystify brought me back; I did the half-back style I used to wear all the time when my aesthetic was Renaissance princess (also in high school). It’s a distinctly different look that’s three notches wavier than I’m used to, but I was into it, and it lasted all day.
Tons of curl rehydrating sprays come with ingredient lists that feature water and alcohol front and center, and to those I say, how dare you? I’m not trying to pay double digit prices for glorified water. Worst of all is the betrayal when you spray them on, things look great, and then you check yourself an hour later and the water led to even more frizzing. I’m happy to say that’s not the case with Sexy Hair’s Curl Recover Curl Reviving Spray. The initial spritz feels a little damp and slightly sticky, but within a minute it fades into honest-to-God hold—something that’s hard to come by in a light, non-gel formula.
I wouldn’t reach for it when my curls are ruined and there’s no time to shower, but it’s good for blending them back together if you wake up and there’s some mild separation. That kind of thing—the coming-apart curls at the bottom left—are the warning sign that my hair’s about to enter stage Seriously Puffy, and spraying throughout the day effectively kept it at bay. It came with less shine than the Living Proof, but more hold, so proceed as you see fit. This one was best for reconstruction, especially if you get in there and scrunch the curls as you spray them.
I like my mascara to be big, flashy, and easy on the eyes. Those are the three goals, and while it seems like that’s what every new mascara release promises to deliver, very few follow through on that last, crucial stake. Blame my dry eyes, allergies, and the office AC—I blame them all, ruthlessly. But the fact remains that while I love trying new mascaras, by the end of the day I’ve smudged it, I’ve rubbed it, I’ve put eye drops in underneath it, and that leaves just the slightest trace of mascara still hanging around.
Which sucks, especially because my specific problems aside, this summer has been good to us in mascara options. From Dior’s fun and efficient squeezy tube, to Urban Decay’s sex-proof mascara, and L’Oréal’s excellent drugstore stunner, we’ve got choices. Then again, so did Carrie Bradshaw for six seasons and look how that turned out. (Fine, that was regarding men, not mascaras, but as often as she stared at a computer screen too, I bet she also knew this struggle.)
After trying endless reccs from friends and every new launch that caught my eye, I couldn’t help but wonder where was my match? My one loyal mascara I could trust to stay with me on my lashes day in and day out? Was I destined to settle? This, of course, is hyperbole, but to both my elation and dismay (#TeamBerger) I actually did find “the one” that met all my needs. Mr. Big. Or rather, because it’s a Lancôme mascara and the brand is French, Monsieur Big.
Unlike its namesake (who was flaky at best), this Big comes through. With just a few strokes, my lashes become dark, thick, and long enough to graze my browbrone. It doesn’t even leave those annoying smudges behind that other mascaras do, because the best part is, it stays where you want it. I have my morning regimen down to a science, so I can say with some certainty that I apply my mascara at around 7:42 A.M. every day. By the time I call it quits and wash my face around 11 it’s still there, curl perfectly intact. Coming from the brand behind the cult favorite Definicils mascara, I shouldn’t have expected any less.
I almost judged a book by its cover; a product by its silly (yet also entirely brilliant) name. But this is a great mascara.
