Shoulder length hair that's neither straight nor curly - wtf can I do with it...

[SheGotOffThePlane]

That doesn't involve straightening it every day?
It's curly-ish at the front, graduating to merely wavy round the back.
It doesn't help that I can't grow it longer without it turning into rats tails
However I can go to sleep with straight hair and get up in the morning and look like I've been electrocuted.
It's currently light blonde but I'm planning on darkening it down a bit this week, but what can I do to make it look ok this summer? I'm thinking I need to embrace the wave at least? - but how??

Hello everybody. Brand new on mumsnet here and just wanted to chime in with endless praise for the curly girl method and all its done for my hair, which a few years ago I would have described exactly as you have described yours.

If you can get to Birmingham there is a specialist curly hair salon there called spring is in the hair, they are really nice, and they will teach you how to do everything. My hair now looks incredible pretty much all the time and I barely do anything to it. Worth investigating!

No shampoo at all ever!?
Over the last few weeks I've started to use shampoo just once a week on mine and dd's hair. Her hair is more curly than mine.
And just conditioner every other day.
Dd's hair gets so tangled and matted if I don't at least run conditioner and water through it.
Sorry without going through the ingredients on all my products where I'm a likely to find the sulphates and silicon that needs ditching?

Nope, no shampoo at all. It's slightly more complex in that it's best to do a final wash with a normal shampoo to get all the silicones out. Lots of info on the FB curly girl group
This is after 6 weeks no shampoo on my hair

Or go the other way and do a keratin treatment to smooth out the wave? This is the way I go.

"No shampoo at all ever!?"

Nope, you wash it with conditioner though, I was a bit unsure about it because like I said I'd tried it before but got it a bit wrong so I bought a sulphate free shampoo in case I did need to use it sometimes, but it's still unused.

You do need to check ingredients though, or cheat and join Facebook groups with nice handy lists of stuff, lol

Thanks I will take a look.
What about chlorine? My dd swims alot. And those rubber caps pull on her hair. I currently use the boots after swim shampoo I'm not at home to check the ingredients. Or does any one no a more natural way of removing chlorine?
After swimming is the only time I shampoo her hair now a days. Even just going from using shampoo 4/5 times a week to 1 has made a really big difference

Chlorine is water soluble, so it should wash out fine and then just a deeper condition to combat the drying out it does, though off she's washing it herself and isn't as effective you should see a difference jus the changing to a sulphate and silicone free shampoo (assuming that one isn't, I don't know)

IME what you put on your hair after you've washed it is more important than what you wash it with.
Avoiding silicone has been the key for me (wavy, frizzy caucasian hair with some curls at the front), moisturising the hell out of my hair (various oils, mainly) and using something like Boots curl creme. I just use whatever shampoo is in the shower from DH or DSs , but admittedly having my hair quite short at the moment makes it easier to avoid split ends and straw.