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Yahoo!'s "curly hair" search results took us to naturallycurly.com, an upbeat site "for girls with curls" that offers product recommendations, styling advice, and a good-natured community of girls who've learned to stop hating the frizzies and love their loopy locks. Unfortunately we didn't learn why curls curl. We continued searching the "Web Page Matches" in Yahoo!'s search results, and discovered an old post from the Mad Scientist Network, "a collective cranium of scientists providing answers to your questions," that gave us a start in the right direction. It discusses how to change
straight hair into curly hair by changing "the number of disulfide bond cross-links between methionine and cysteine amino acid units in individual keratin protein molecules." Apparently that's the technical description of a permanent wave or perm. We wanted just a little more information, so we expanded our search by using the terms "hair chemistry" -- and turned up a feature from the Exploratorium titled Better Hair Through Chemistry. It's a great introduction to all aspects of hair science. We learned that when you curl your hair, whether in a perm or a wet-set, you change the chemical bonds that hold together the protein fibers on the coiled strand of each hair's cortex.
In a wet set you change hydrogen bonds; a permanent wave breaks the disulfide bonds mentioned earlier. During our search, we came across a set of folktales with the common theme of Straightening a Curly Hair. In each of these stories a seemingly unstoppable demon is defeated because he is unable to straighten a strand of curly hair. Anyone who's ever tried to make their own curls straight will appreciate the demon's difficulties. For more hair science and relief from bad hair demons, check out Yahoo!'s collection of web sites about hair.
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