I hate this, because almost no one knows it. No one tells kids with curly hair how to actually take care of their hair.
You can’t treat curly hair like straight hair and expect the same results! You can’t! It doesn’t work! Curly hair gets its own routine!
Okay, look, here’s the deal.
Your curls are… curls. They are MEANT to go together into a GROUP. They are not like straight hair which just hands out in one big… thing. Curls have groups.
By BRUSHING it, you are splitting those good-curl groups into separate strands, which, on their own, are STILL trying their goddamned best to curl, but now that they are away from their friends, they are only clinging haphazardly to each other as best as they can and creating tangles!
Here’s what brushed curly hair looks like:
Here’s what well-treated curly hair that has CURL-FRIENDS is supposed to look like (curl size may vary):
See how the curl is NOT only one strand of hair? It’s a whole group!
You know how you get those nice curls?
STOP BRUSHING. Give your curls back their curl-friends!
Okay, here’s the deal - you sit down. You look at this chart. Figure out your type of curl. (guesstimate)
And now you go to this website and you read about what curly hair actually needs to thrive, and you change your routine, and you promise me that you will NEVER disappoint your curls like that again!!!!
Basics:
1) Curly hair is damaged by heat, lack of moisture, and sulfates in shampoo.
- No blowdrying - use a cotton towel or t-shirt to scrunch your hair and get extra moisture out, and allow to air-dry
- Turn down the shower temp while washing hair. I mean it.
- Try to find a better shampoo.
2) Curly hair NEEDS moisture, and it NEEDS leave-in conditioner.
- Use lots of conditioner.
- Use leave-in conditioner
- Try to use water spray over chemical setting sprays.
3) Curly hair does not need to be brushed, only combed with a wide-tooth comb.
- Comb the hair through with your fingers while in the shower and detangle while you have conditioner in.
- Comb again with a wide-toothed comb after the shower if needed
- If you need to, use a twist of some sort to keep hair out of the way, but don’t squeeze it too much - give it room to breathe!
More tips from smarter people probably exist but that’s the basic stuff.
PLEASE be nice to your curly hair.
My parents both had straight hair and once a week they’d sit me down on the floor and comb out the tangles, which *hurt* and tell me that my hair wouldn’t be such a rat’s nest if I’d just brush it.
NO. No! That is advice that would have worked fine for my sister, who had straight, fine hair. She brushed her hair as much as I did and didn’t have tangles like I did because she wasn’t disrupting a curl pattern.
Look, I made a meme about it:
When I posted it on FB it started a conversation with a bunch of friends who have straight hair who have kids with curly hair and I realized something:
IF YOU KNOW A KID WITH CURLY HAIR WHOSE PARENTS DON’T HAVE CURLY HAIR YOU GOTTA TALK TO THOSE PARENTS. THEY DON’T KNOW. THEY’RE AS CONFUSED AS YOU WERE AS A LITTLE BEAN. They’re doing exactly what worked for them as kids and suddenly it’s not working and they’re frustrated and they don’t want their little curly-haired kid crying over tangles and they don’t know how to fix it.
I didn’t have conditioner until I was a teenager because the 2-in-one combo was good enough I guess? Someone at a salon had to tell my mom “oh, no, this is getting damaged because it needs more moisture, it’s making the tangling worse.“
Save the children. Tell your friends with kids. Be the curly guardian angel you needed.
I think I am most bewildered by how many people seem to think that you spend the rest of the day reeking of gas fumes if you touch a gas pump. Do they think you pour the gas all over yourself…? Why are these gas fumes clinging to you through your day such that you will not be fit to be around other humans…?
I didn’t even know there were places left that let you pump your own gas.
I didn’t know there were any stations left where people don’t pump their own gas. Every gas station I’ve ever seen has been self-service since the 1970s.
I’ve lived in Central Michigan my entire life and i have never heard of people just….not pumping their gas……i’m so fucking confused.
Oregon: You expect us to pump our own gas like peasants? :/
i feel like counter-trolling is an essential skill that kids online aren’t learning and it’s kinda worrying
like back in my day, the day of online forums, learning how to trick someone in to getting themselves banned was an essential skill. if you could tell someone was a chud, you would ask them short, leading questions and watch them get frustrated and post longer and longer rants until they said something that would catch a mod’s attention and get them banned and/or at least publicly humiliated.
and guess what? that’s the exact same tactics the alt-right use now. these people are exclusively acting in bad faith. every interaction these people post online is done with the intention of getting someone to respond to them so they can screenshot the massive paragraphs of text and laugh
so, what’s the solution?
dare ‘em to post dick pics.
don’t acknowledge the content of the stuff they post. if you see someone trying to engage you in bad faith just dare them to post pictures of their penis until they either get frustrated and leave or get frustrated and do it. either way they lose.
this is the tactic used by the fans of a podcast (that i haven’t listened to) called the Chapo Trap House, and 4chan’s /pol/ users fucking HATE them. they hate Chapo Trap House and think they’re crazy because Chapo Trap House fans refuse to engage in meaningful debate and repeatedly demand dick pics. they get frustrated and leave. it works.
Some of you never used your position as a mod on an a series of unfortunate events forum to get a racist troll to post evidence of their tax fraud and it shows
…that second comment is oddly specific and I’m a little scared
National Geographic on Facebook: this is a facial reconstruction of a teenage girl who lived 9000 years ago based on her remains!
half the comments: men criticizing her looks and saying she’s unattractive and mannish
anyway this is the reconstruction and I always enjoy seeing the faces of prehistoric humans and how much we have in common over thousands of years despite how incredibly different our lives are. I support her and I think she looks wonderful.
everyone in the replies of this post saying “well I think she’s pretty!” missed the whole damn point lmao
I remember watching a documentary once where historians were trying to work out who a dead girl was and what her life was like. I’m pretty sure they dated the body back to the early Victorian era, and established pretty early on that she lived in poverty, died young, and was most certainly a prostitute.
The grand finale of the show was the reveal of her reconstructed face. Now, bare in mind that through their investigations they discovered that she had lived an awful life and died an agonizing death (syphilis iirc). So, you can imagine my disgust when the historians reacted with disappointment at the reveal of her ‘face’. This poor girl, who had suffered terribly, was obviously not the poor, tragic beauty they had been hoping for.
She was plain, maybe some would say she was ugly, but what was truly hideous was the fact that you could practically see the sympathy these historians had for this poor girl slip away as they looked at her ‘face’, and you could certainly hear it in their voices.
Even in death our value rests on the basis of our looks. Sympathy is conditional - based on where you fall on the looks scale.
Science: *gives us the miracle of seeing long-dead faces*
There are a few programs I use on an almost daily basis as an artist and illustrator which I find invaluable, but that seem to be unfortunately more secret than they deserve to be. Which is too bad, because they solve a lot of small workflow problems that I think a number of people would find useful!
I’ll keep this list limited to my big three, but it is organized in order of usefulness. (And incidentally of compatibility, as the latter two are Windows-only. Sorry! Please do still check out PureRef though, Mac users.)
PureRef is a program specifically designed to make it easier to view, sort, and work with your references. I actually put off downloading it initially because it seemed redundant– couldn’t I just paste the refs into my PSD files? Indeed, the only real barrier to working with PureRef is that learning the keyboard shortcuts and the clicks to move around the program takes a little while. But getting over that hump is well worth it, because it has some distinct advantages over trying to organize your refs in your actual art program.
Firstly, you’re no longer bogging down your actual PSD file with extra layers, nor having to fight with said layers at all– PureRef has no layer panel, so you never have to scramble to grab the right one. All images you paste into the program retain their original resolution data, so you can resize, rotate, crop, etc as needed without distortion. If you find yourself needing to adjust the values, color, etc of a ref image, you can just copy paste it into Photoshop, make your adjustments, and copy paste it back into PureRef.
The other great advantage is that you can toggle the program as ‘Stay On Top’ and keep it above Photoshop (or whatever else)– which was always a problem when trying to make a reference collage in a separate PSD file. I find that I just don’t look at my references as much as I should when they are on a second monitor, and this solves that problem.
I’ve used it religiously for about a year now, creating a new PureRef file for every illustration I do, as well as a few for specific characters, cultures, or settings in personal projects. As you can see in the example above, I like to sort my images into little clusters or ‘islands’ of specific content, so that I can easily scroll out to see the entire reference map, then zoom in to the relevant cluster easily.
There is one big tip I would suggest for using this program, if you have the harddrive space: As soon as you get it, turn on the ‘Embed local images in save file’ option. This will make your PureRef files bigger, but you’ll never have to deal with a ‘broken link’ if you move around the source files you originally dragged in.
This is such a simple little app that it doesn’t have a very formal name, though I think of it as ‘Work’ or ‘Work Work’ (for some reason.) It’s a timer that counts when your cursor is active in any (of up to 3) program you set it to count for, and stops counting when you change programs or idle. No starting, pausing, stopping, or forgetting to do any of those three things.
I use this one to accurately track my hours, both to inform myself and for commissions or other client work. At the end of a work session, I take the hours counted and add them to the hours I’ve already spent on that image in a spreadsheet.
I have it set to count my three art programs (Photoshop, Painter, and Manga Studio), so based on the settings I use, it doesn’t count time that I spend doing relevant work in my browser (such as looking up an email to double check character descriptions or ref hunting), so to counter that, I set the ‘Timeout’ option in it’s menu to 360. This means it will count to 360 seconds of cursor inactivity before it considers me idle and stops counting. Since it instantly stops counting if you switch to ‘non-work’ a program, I figure this extra time just about cancels out relevant time that it ignores in ‘non-work’ programs by counting an extra minute or so when I walk away from the computer to grab some water or what-have-you.
I use Carapace the least of these three, since my work doesn’t often have a need for creating perspective lines. But when there is architecture involved in something, this proves invaluable in simplifying that process.
Carapace lets you copy paste an image into it, and then drop in vanishing points and move them around to create perspective lines. (Though you’ll want to scale down your full res drawing or painting a bit to avoid lagging the program.) Like with PureRef, fighting the shortcuts is the worst part of it, though for myself it’s more of an issue in this program because I don’t use it often enough to remember them. Still, it gets the job done, and it’s easy to adjust the points to feel things out until you get them ‘right’. Then you just copy and paste the grid back into your art program and you’ve got that information to use as need be on its own layer.
Of course, using Carapace isn’t a replacement for actually knowing how perspective works– you still have to have a sense of how far apart the vanishing points should be placed to keep things feeling believable. But it sure does save you a lot of trouble once you do have that knowledge.
So, there are my big three recommendations for programs to help your art workflow. I hope people find them useful– if you do, please share so that they climb a little higher out of their unwarranted obscurity! And if you’ve got a favorite tool like this that I didn’t cover, feel free to share it in the comments. I know I’m curious to see what else is out there, too. Also, if Mac users have any suggestions for programs that fill similar functions, feel free to share there as well!
Do I, as a conservative, get upset over it? Than it is totally reasonable, smart, and wise to do so. Getting mad at a Gillette commercial for appealing to feminists is actually cool and good. Getting mad at kids television or movies for including people of color or queer people? Totally amazing and also highly educated. Getting mad at video games and toys made for people half my age? Nothing snowflakey about any of this, its actually a reasonable response.
Do liberals or leftists get upset over it? Well then it is just the weak, snowflake generation getting offended over everything. I can’t believe the thin skin on these people. Getting mad at systemic racism or homophobia? Can you imagine if we just got upset over nothing? Lol.
this is why old ppl never realize what they’re saying when they say “when i was your age i payed for my tuition all by myself” yeah well sorry susan my tuition is $35,000 a year and i make $7 an hour
And then they’ll say that they only made 5$ an hour.
First english lecture of the year and the prof begins it with: «we will only focus on the british isles so thankfully we dont need to talk about the mess that is the U.S, since it is beneath us… NO ITS NOT HERES A DUMB QUOTE BY TRUMP»
i understand the historical reasons why English is the most common language
but if I was writing a speculative fiction novel
and I said “the language that most people learn as a second language, usually for professional reasons, is also the only one with a spelling system so terrible that spelling words correctly is a broadcasted competition”
you’d be like “extremely unrealistic 0/10”
i never thought of this, do other languages not have spelling bees?
