EDMONTON - Holster the flat irons, girlfriends; curls are making waves again.

With up to 65 per cent of the general population born with naturally curly hair, it’s about time we stopped fighting it.

“If you look at how trends work, it’s no big surprise that women are back into curls,” says

Anne Thomas of Dandy Salon Spa (formerly Swizzlesticks).

“We spent the last five to seven years flat-ironing everything and the pendulum has swung the other way.”

Young fashionistas who were too young or weren’t even born when curls were last trendy are driving the trend, Thomas says, inspired by such hair icons as singer Beyonce Knowles.

Health Canada probably hastened the change when it issued a warning last fall about the Brazilian Blowout, a popular hair-smoothing treatment hailed as a revolution in hairstyling until it was found to contain 12 per cent formaldehyde, far exceeding the 0.2 per cent allowed in cosmetics.

Nobody could be happier about the turn in hair trends than Sara McGuire.

She used to straighten her big, wavy curls every day, but stopped because it took her three hours to do it, and if her hair got wet or sweaty, she’d have to start over.

“It’s just too much work,” says McGuire, 26, whose hair is now in its natural state 99 per cent of the time.

And why bother straightening, when she knows lots of girls who spend hours trying to get the curls she has naturally?

Twenty-five-year-old Leanne Erickson’s wavy blond tresses go au naturel these days as well, though she admits she never became a flat-iron fanatic because it was too damaging for her fine hair.

“I pretty much just wash and go,” she says.

Hair stylists everywhere are heartened to hear that more women are embracing what they were born with.

Marianne Ulmer, senior stylist at Sacre Blue Salon, has been trying for more than a year to convince her younger clients to stop flat ironing every day.

Ironing hair at 450 F every day burns and scorches it, causing it to break.

“We’re saying embrace your natural hair. Why are you flat ironing it and managing it when you already have beautiful hair?” Ulmer says.

Most of the clients who come for curls to Ricci Hair have them styled in, or enhanced, but a small, growing number are actually starting to ask for the P-word again, says Vicky Rubzow.

“Perm” was a dirty word for decades because of the damage it did to people’s hair in the 1970s.

The technique hasn’t changed much in 30 years, but perm products are not as harsh today, she explains.

And the look is different.

Today’s perms are all about adding texture and body and a little volume.

“We’re not doing perming of the ’80s where everyone was running around looking like a poodle,” Rubzow says. “It’s less structured, more wild.”

Jolan Magnan, hair styling instructor at Marvel College, calls today’s curly locks “deflated texture, not curly and poofy, but soft and beachy” as if you just got out of the water and towelled your hair dry.

Anne Thomas of Dandy Salon Spa doesn’t think the perm will be as big this time around, because a lot more people colour their hair these days. Colouring and perming, because they’re both chemical processes, affect the success of one or the other, she explains.

One of the reasons perms fell out of favour after the last go-round was because people started embracing colour, she says.

Perms are much more popular and will likely continue to be that way in Asian markets, where most people have naturally straight hair, Thomas says. They’ll likely gain some ground here if the curly trend continues for a while and people tire of having to curl their hair every day.

czdeb@edmontonjournal.com