Author
Hi, I'm Kendra
I have about ten minutes to do my hair on a weekday, and I leave the house at 7:15. That's the entire reason this site exists.
I'm not a licensed stylist. No cosmetology school, no license, no salon chair — and I don't cut hair, mine or anyone else's. I tried once, in 2019, with kitchen scissors and a lot of confidence. I ended up with a bob I didn't ask for and nine months of growing it out, and that's the last haircut I'll ever perform.
What I do have is fifteen years of doing my own hair every single workday, and since 2017, a habit of writing it all down: how long a style actually took, how long it lasted, and what made it fall apart. That's around 1,100 attempts now. Most of them weren't worth publishing. The ones that were are here.
What's different about the way I write these up:
Timings come from the third attempt, not the first. The first time you try a style it takes fourteen minutes and looks wrong. By the third it takes six. The third number is the one that matters, so that's the one I give you.
Every style says how long it actually held, and what killed it. Not "lasts all day." More like: held from 7:30 until about 4, then the front pieces slid out, and the culprit was a wool coat collar.
I tell you who it won't work on. My hair is 2b wavy, fine strands, medium density, a few inches past my shoulders. A style that depends on fine hair gripping a bobby pin will not behave the same way on thick hair, and saying "works for all hair types" would just be a lie.
For haircuts, I write from the client's side of the chair. I can't cut hair, but after fifteen years and two stylists I trust, I've gotten very good at the consultation — the exact words to use, what to bring, what to ask about grow-out, and what to say when you can see it going wrong in the mirror.
I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan with my husband Dustin and our daughter Nora, in a house with one bathroom and genuinely terrible lighting, which is why I do my hair at a vanity by the bedroom window instead. I work four days a week in member services at a credit union. Nora is nine and has beautiful 3c curls that I've spent nine years learning to care for — from curly and Black hair specialists, whom I name and link to, because that expertise isn't mine to claim.
If you try something here and it doesn't work on your hair, tell me. That's more useful to me than the posts that go well.
Kendra
