Frizzy Hair in Rain: What Men Can Do

Rain undoes your hair because water breaks the temporary bonds holding it in the shape you dried it into this morning, and your hair starts heading back to whatever it does naturally. The water does not go in evenly, so the strand bends at different angles along its length rather than simply dropping. Frizzy hair in rain hits men with wavy, curly or sun-worn hair hardest, and if yours is fine and straight it tends to go flat instead of fuzzy. Either way the fix is mostly about how you dry it afterwards, not what you put on it.

Why you get frizzy hair in rain

Your hair holds a style because of temporary bonds that form as it dries. Water competes for those bonds and breaks them. That is what lets a dryer put your hair where it would never go on its own, and it is equally why the weather takes it straight back off you. We went through that mechanism in what happens to your hair overnight, and it works the same on a pillowcase as it does on Harrow Road.

Frizz is the second half of the story. Water does not soak into a strand evenly. It goes in fastest where the cuticle, the overlapping outer layer, is already lifted: sun damage from the summer, bleach, a dryer held too close for too long, or just the age of the ends. Those patches swell more than the rest of the strand, so the hair kinks in several directions along its own length instead of lying one way.

Which is why two men can walk the same ten minutes through the same drizzle and only one of them arrives looking like he lost an argument. Hair in decent condition, cuticle lying flat, takes water on slowly and fairly evenly. Porous hair takes it on in patches, and patches are what you see.

A drizzle is worse than a downpour

This sounds wrong until it has happened to you a few times.

Proper rain soaks you through. Every hair ends up equally wet, the style is gone, and there is nothing ambiguous about it. That is recoverable. Evenly wet hair will take a set again the same way it did in the bathroom this morning, so if you can get somewhere dry you can put it back deliberately.

Drizzle is the one that ruins your day. There is enough water to break the set on the outer layer and around the ends, and not enough to reach the hair underneath. The top layer lifts and goes its own way while everything below it stays where you put it. That mismatch is the fuzzy halo. And because it is only half wet, you cannot re-set it without wetting the rest, which is the last thing anybody wants to do at ten past nine on a Tuesday.

So the man who got caught in a real downpour and has ten minutes indoors is in better shape than the man who strolled through mist.

Getting it back once you are inside

The instinct is to reach for product. Not yet. Clay, paste and wax all need dry hair to grip, and on damp hair they dilute, slide about and seal the wet in underneath, so the frizz stays for the afternoon.

Get the water out mechanically first, and press rather than rub. Rubbing a towel over a soaked head is a lot of friction against a cuticle that is already lifted and soft, and it is one of the more reliable ways to turn damp hair into frizzy hair. Squeeze it, blot it, leave it alone.

Then be honest about how wet it actually is. If only the top layer went, run damp fingers through the whole of the top so that all of it is at the same wetness before you dry it. Evening it up is the step everybody skips and it is the one that decides the result, because the bonds re-form in whatever shape the hair is in as it dries. Half-damp hair re-forms into two shapes at once, and that is where you started.

Then dry it with some intent. Fingers into the roots, air moving, pushing the hair in the direction you want it to sit. Thirty seconds of that is worth five minutes of patting at it with a towel. No dryer to hand is fine, your hands and a bit of time will do it, as long as the hair is evenly damp when you begin.

Product goes in last, on dry hair, and you want less of it than usual.

Hoods, caps and the walk itself

An umbrella is the only one of the three that leaves your hair alone, which is the argument for carrying one.

A hood keeps the water off and then does something else instead. It holds the top and sides flat against your head while the hair is damp, and damp hair held flat for a quarter of an hour dries flat. You arrive with a dent rather than frizz. Better than frizz, but the style has still gone.

A cap does the same and adds a hard line across the forehead.

None of that means do not wear them. It means doing what the autumn advice on this site already says about beanies: style it when you arrive, not before you leave. Carry the tin instead of wearing it out of the door. Ninety seconds in a work toilet with hair that has dried off will beat anything you built at half seven and then squashed under nylon for twenty minutes.

If you are walking to us, it is about ten minutes on foot from Westbourne Park and twelve from Warwick Avenue, and there is not a lot of shelter on either route. The towpath has none at all. We have plenty of towels, and we would far rather you turned up wet than rescheduled.

Weight is what actually decides it

Product is the last five per cent of this. What really governs how your hair behaves in the wet is how much weight is sitting in it, and how much of your style is propped up by volume rather than by the cut.

Weight is the problem. A heavy top holds more water, and the wetter it gets the heavier it gets, and the further it drops from wherever you put it. Take that weight out with texturising and the same length carries less water and springs back instead of going over. It is scissor work inside the cut you are already paying for, so it costs nothing extra. You have to ask for it.

The sides matter for a different reason. When the top does give up, short sides mean the shape of your head still reads as deliberate rather than accidental, and you can push the top back and get away with it. A taper is the sensible version of that through a wet month.

The product side of this is a genuinely different problem, and we answered it separately: what to use when the air is damp goes through matte clay, salt spray and why glycerin works against you on a muggy day. Damp air and actual rain are not the same problem, but the products that survive one tend to survive the other.

Half an hour and £15 covers a haircut with that scissor work in it. Forty minutes and £17 covers a taper fade.

One honest caveat

No cut and no product makes hair waterproof. Anyone selling you that is selling you something.

What all of this buys you is the difference between a style that goes over in the rain and comes back in two minutes, and one that is finished for the rest of the day. On a wet Wednesday that is a real difference, and it is most of what we can actually do for you from this side of the chair.

If yours gives up every time it spits, book a haircut and tell us that while we are still settling on the length. It changes how much comes out of the top, and where from.