Tutorial: Natural waves with GHD

As much as I care a lot about what my hair looks like, I am very rubbish in some areas. I'm terrible at using heat defence products, for instance, and I've had the same terrible hairdryer for years. It's got a crack in it and always smells like burning hair, yet I never replace it because I basically suck. My glamorous life. Fortuitously, Best British Bloggers got in touch recently and asked me if I wanted to review something from ghd. I love my straighteners, so asked to try out their hairdryer. I've read a lot of reviews on blogs recently about how great it is, and was actually planning to buy one anyway so it was amazing timing.



My hair is naturally very thick, coarse, wiry and frizzy. It's good because it's pretty versatile and holds a style quite well (ghd curls will stay in all day) but it's bad because I can never just wash and go - I always have to do something to it, or it'll be unmanageable. You remember how Hermione's hair looks in the first film? That, basically. If I don't blowdry my fringe, it gets all kinky and gappy, and straighteners can't do anything to help.



I definitely noticed the difference with the ghd hairdryer - it dried my hair much faster (I usually never bother drying all my hair because it takes too long - I just do the front and put the rest in a ponytail) and I was surprised that my hair felt softer, too. Apparently it's more powerful, but the air is cooler, so it damages it less. Clever! I thought I'd put it to the test on the blog with a hair tutorial - I've been meaning to do this one anyway, so it fits perfectly.



Since buying ghd straighteners a couple of years ago, I've more or less given up straightening my hair. I probably do it a couple of times a year - and I used to do it almost every day, so that's pretty wacky. The problem was that my hair is naturally wavy, and didn't want to stay straight. If there was a hint of moisture in the air, it was a disaster area. Learning ghd curls was the best thing I ever did, because they smooth my hair like it's straightened, but let my hair do what it wants - be curly, that is. It takes at least half an hour to straighten my mop, but I can curl it in 10 minutes. I know though that doing ghd curls are something that a lot of people still can't master so I thought I'd try my hand at explaining it to you. It's so easy when you know how!



Brush your wet hair and rough-dry it with your fabulous ghd hairdryer.

Make sure you pretend you're in a music video at least once.

When it's dry, brush it again (this is so much straighter than my hair usually is when blowdried - impressive, ghds!)

Part your hair into bunches and put one side in a band, leaving the other side loose. Take a small section from the very back of the loose side, then twist the rest up in a clip, leaving the small section loose.



Curl this section first - you're going to work forwards from the back, as it means that each 'done' section can just go over your shoulder and won't get in your way.

Clamp the top of the section with your straighteners, and smooth the top third of the section down a few times. This just ensures if your hair is frizzy like mine, it'll look smooth at the top.



Go over that section again, but this time when you get to about a third of the way down you're going to start to curl.



Clamp the straighteners at that point and then flip them around 180 degrees so your hair wraps around them.

Pull the straighteners down the hair (still clamped) and keep twisting so your hair continues to wrap round as you drag them down your hair. The more times you wrap your hair, the tighter the curl will be.



Don't release until you've reached the end of the section and the hair should just slide out. Twist slightly with your finger to form the curl but you should have a perfect curl. This shows it a bit closer. Clamp, pull, twist, pull, twist.

Push this section behind your shoulders, grab another section from the back of the clipped up hair and repeat until you get to the front.



I usually make sure I curl the front sections away from my face - simply, when you twist the straighteners, you go towards the back of the head rather than the front.

When you're happy with that side, repeat on the other side.

When you're all done, run your hands through your hair to loosen up the curls and make them look more natural. Finish with a spritz of hairspray.

ghd curling seems complicated as it's so different from what we're used to but it's really easy. The key thing to remember is it's backwards. You start at the top and work down, whereas with most wands you start at the bottom and work up. As soon as I clicked that you twisted the ghds as you drag them down the hair, it became easy and now I don't know how I got on without it. I really noticed the difference with using a good hairdryer though - my hair was smoother to start with and still looked great by the end of the day.



There are lots more great tutorials on the ghd website!

The hairdryer was a PR sample sent for review by Best British Bloggers on behalf of ghd. All other products featured (including the straighteners) were bought with my own money. All opinions are my own.