How Kate Found Out She Had More Curl Than She Thought

The best styling advice doesn’t end when the call does. It sends you home to experiment — and the real session is what you learn when you come back. When Kate returned for her second appointment with StyldLife hairstylist Erikajoy Gardner, she came bearing a haul and a confession: she’d tried, she’d improvised, and she wasn’t sure she’d done any of it right.

She had, mostly. Some of the products Erikajoy recommended weren’t easy to find — Kate had hunted a few down on eBay, ordered her Miss Jessie’s online, and grabbed the one Cibu item she could actually locate (the shine oil). She’d worked through the anti-breakage shampoo and conditioner, the Not So Naughty leave-in, the glosser. The wave spray, the linchpin of the whole routine, she hadn’t managed to track down. “I only had the one name memorized,” she admitted. Lesson noted: even great advice needs a findable shopping list.

But something more interesting had surfaced in all that trial and error. Kate had assumed she was a straight-haired person coaxing out the occasional beachy wave. The experiments told a different story. “I think I have more curl than I thought,” she said — and Erikajoy, who’d suspected as much, lit up. This is the entire reason she sends clients home to let their hair air-dry instead of reaching for a diffuser. “It’ll show you exactly what your hair does,” she said. “Just put your products on, scrunch it with your hand, let it air dry through the day, and see what kind of frizz you’re looking at and how strong a product you need.”

So they reset the plan around the discovery. Wave spray first, still — the gentlest way to see what’s there. But if the curl turned out to be as strong as it was starting to look, the next step up was a light gel: a curl-defining product like the ones Erikajoy reaches for when a client clearly has texture to work with. The throughline she’d taught in session one held: don’t force it, read it. Let the hair tell you which product it needs instead of deciding in advance.

Then Erikajoy opened the door to a new option — a step up in both quality and price. Alongside the Target-aisle Miss Jessie’s, she pointed Kate toward Ouidad, a curl specialist she’s used and trusted for years. Her honesty about it was the tell of a real pro and not a salesperson: it’s expensive, she warned, even for stylists who buy it at a discount — but it genuinely works, and Kate wouldn’t need the heavy-duty version made for tightly coiled hair. Something built for waves-to-curls would be plenty. A great option to graduate into once Kate knew exactly what her hair wanted.

There was comedy in it, too — the kind that makes a virtual session feel like a video call with a friend who happens to be an expert. Kate kept ducking out of frame chasing better light (“there’s no light over here — we gotta figure this out”), showing off the personality she’d coaxed into a simple bun, narrating the difference between how her waves looked on camera versus how they looked, softly undone, in real life. “It looks kind of nice in real life,” she said. “Like it’s not trying.” Which, in the end, was the whole goal: hair that looks effortless precisely because someone taught you how to work with it.

Kate walked away with a clearer map than most people ever get — a sense of her own texture, a short list of products matched to it, and the confidence to keep experimenting until she landed on her favorite. Not a single perfect style handed to her, but a way of understanding her hair that keeps paying off long after the screen goes dark.

All of it, again, from two different states and one shared screen — proof that the right guidance travels.

Meet your stylist: Erikajoy Gardner — hair & makeup artist for film, TV, and weddings, based in Florida. Book with Erikajoy: https://styldlifebookings.as.me/Erikajoy

This story reflects a real, paid StyldLife client session. To protect our client’s privacy, the client is not pictured.