People always say that a diffuser is a must for people who have curly hair because a hair dryer with a diffuser can define curls and waves better. People love diffusers because a diffuser can also faster drying time and add more hair volume to curly hair, leaving curls bouncy and in good shape.
However, we are not here to discuss the advantages of diffusers today. What if you don’t have a diffuser around? How can you achieve beautiful salon-grade curly hair with a blow dryer without a diffuser? It’s still possible! In this tutorial, I am not going to let your towel dry or air dry your hair since they are not “blow dry” and they take too long to get your hair dry completed. Follow the steps below and see how to blow dry curly hair without a diffuser correctly.
How To Use a Hair Dryer to Blow Dry Curly Hair Without a Diffuser
Step One: Cleanse Your Hair
When you don’t have a diffuser at hand, you shouldn’t use any heavy hair conditioner on top of your hair as it will weigh down your hair, causing your hair very flat and stiff. You can try to apply conditioner on your hair ends to make them less frizzy and smooth, but avoid the top part of your head.
Step Two: Apply Heat Protectant
If you want to make your curls more voluminous, you can go for those versatile heat protectants or hair primers that help your gain hair volume and protect your strands from heat. But the most important thing is still the same: Don’t use any hair products with heavy ingredients that make your hair dull and weighed-down.
Step Three: Roughly Dry Your Hair with a Towel
You can choose to towel-dry your hair simply, or plop your hair and press the towel gently to let your curls be less wet and remain defined. (You can see what plopping is and how to do it in the video below) Don’t press your hair too hard since we don’t want our curls to lose their shapes and texture and we don’t have a diffuser to lift the curls up. If your hair is easy to get tangled, you should break the clumps up and detangle hair knots in this step as well.
Step Four: Dry Your Curls with Your Blow Dryer
Plug in your hair dryer and set the heat settings to “low” or “medium”. I know that not using a high setting will make the drying process longer, but using low heat can make our curls healthier and bouncier. Most importantly, if we don’t have a diffuser around, drying our hair too fast can result in no hair volume, hair frizz, and static.
To blow-dry curly hair without a diffuser, you don’t need other attachments such as nozzles or concentrators either. When blow-drying your hair with no diffuser, I recommend you start with putting your head upside down and letting your curls hair fall down naturally.
After that, I usually would take a handful of my curly hair and hold it up, then direct hot airflow to the bunch that I hold. And I will change my fingers’ position every now and then to make sure strands are being blow-dried evenly. This is also for creating more volume on our curls and waves. If you want to have a huge volume after the blowout, you can flip hair over the opposite way. For example, flip your hair on the left to the right side while drying and move the hair back and forth frequently. The key is to move your hair and so the curls will not stay in one position.