One day last week, a friend complimented me on my hair. She wanted to know if I did something different.
“Actually,” I told her — knowing full well how silly I sounded and, to be honest, seemed to enjoy it — “I used a pasta strainer .”
A few days ago, I came across a video on TikTok of a woman drying her wavy hair with a mesh strainer. By scooping a portion of her hair into a strainer and training her blow dryer on it, she created a makeshift diffuser from her everyday kitchen tools. For drying frizzy hair. 23 million people watched this video. I’ve had good, life-changing experiences with internet hair hacks in the past, so I thought I’d give it a quick try. Remember using the Dyson Airwrap? I’m her thrifty inverse.
I’m one of those people you sometimes hear as a fictional character who didn’t know he had curly hair until he was an adult. Some people asked me, don’t you know such a thing? I don’t have a good answer. Nobody told me! I didn’t know you can’t comb your hair. Then, one day while I was stuck at home in 2020, I decided to try propping, a method of wrapping my hair after washing to give it a natural curl. A bit of a cliché for white women. This explains why we didn’t yet know pasta strainers were viral, since they first went viral in 2017. It’s really tragic how late I was to the party. Now I see people with curly hair like me on the streets.
Since then, I’ve overcorrected and made having curly hair an entire personality of mine. I know there are.) I’m also deeply into the curly internet. “Crush and Condish” and “Scrape Crunch”. These people will definitely think I’m crazy for using a pasta strainer in my hair.
I had my reasons. I hadn’t tried a diffuser since I made the transition to the curly lifestyle relatively late in life, but I’ve recently started getting interested in them. And while I don’t own a diffuser, I do own a cheap ten-year-old pasta he strainer whose plastic handle just happened to partially melt a few years ago. It was taken off the cooking fee if I used it on my hair.
The day I tried the Pasta Strainer Diffuser, I started with a version of my usual hair routine. Pat with a microfiber towel. (Back when I thought I had straight hair, the idea of using any hair product at all, let alone multiple products, would have confused me.) From there, I usually let my hair air dry. . This can take several hours, but at that time, I picked up a hair dryer in one hand and a pasta strainer in the other.
I’ve seen some videos of women straining their hair with pasta, but you have to be willing to adapt because everyone has different amounts of hair, not to mention strainers of different sizes. I found the process of tying my hair to be very intuitive and the same as how I split my hair before tying it. First, grab the ends of some of your hair with a pasta strainer and pull it over your head. Hair curls in it. Then I held it over my head with one hand, flipped it to another spot if the rest of my hair was in the way, and used a hair dryer with my other hand to blow cold air.
Heather Schwedel
It took about 20 minutes for everything to dry. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt like Johnny Appleseed. She looked like she was wearing a pasta strainer as a hat, but that’s not a bad thing. Drying your hair with kitchen tools is silly. Do it.
The other half of the argument for doing it is that it actually works. However, it is not actually used on a daily basis. It worked legally. My curls were well defined and I loved the volume. The top of the hair was slightly curly. This was due to the hair dryer being poorly aimed and occasionally accidentally blowing out hair that wasn’t in the strainer. Your results may vary, but I’ve since spoken to two other people who had good results with it. It is a sign to dry.
My only concern with the pasta strainer was that it could lead to heat damage. However, there are not many studies on the effectiveness of pasta strainers. yes! I spoke to “experts” who recommended against it, but they were experts who had a vested interest in selling diffusers, so I’m not sure how much their advice was worth.
In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I have to admit that I wasn’t so in love when I tried to blow-dry my hair again a few days after the first attempt. I am aware of the absurdity inherent in that complaint —hmm The second time I used a pasta strainer to diffuse my hair, I didn’t have much volume!—and before I become a narcissist who is more obsessed with my hair than I used to be, I need to check myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll try again.But for now, I’m taking a break and using a pasta strainer. dishwasher.
