Reader Notes: Porosity Pattern Guides Edge Cases
Somewhere between the shampoo bottle and the diffuser, most curly routines fall apart. Not because the products are wrong, but because nobody read the hair first. Dense curls are a stubborn mess of contradictions—some strands drink everything, others just sit there. You can't fix that with a mousse. You have to read the sponge map before you start pouring. That map is porosity. It tells you how open the cuticle is, how fast water gets in, and how fast it leaves. On dense curls, reading it takes more than a glance. The usual tests—float, slip, snap—get muddy when hair is thick and coily. But once you learn to read the pattern, your whole routine shifts. This guide is about that first step: mapping porosity before you touch a single item.