My first serious attempt at a wash-and-go took most of an afternoon and produced something that, by the time it dried, looked like I had been mildly electrocuted. I had followed the videos. I had what everybody insists is the ideal curl pattern for it — 3c hair, the one that is supposed to just fall into place. What I had not understood is that a wash-and-go is not a product you buy. It is a sequence, and I had the sequence wrong in about four different places.
So this is not a piece telling you that our curling cream will give you perfect curls. It is a piece about what the style actually asks of you — what has to be true about your hair, your water and the order you do things in — and then, honestly, where a cream like ours sits in that. Which is one step among several, and not the step that decides the outcome.
Key takeaways
- A wash-and-go is a wet set. Hair keeps whatever shape it dries in, so all the styling has to happen while it is genuinely soaking.
- Sequence beats product. Sectioning, saturation and leaving it alone while it dries matter more than which cream you reach for.
- Slip is what a curling cream is really selling you — enough to distribute evenly without pulling curls apart.
- A curling cream is a styling cosmetic. It does not grow hair, thicken hair or change your curl pattern, and hair that is thinning is a doctor’s question.
A wash-and-go is a wet set, not a product
Here is the thing nobody says out loud in the tutorials. When hair is wet, the weak bonds that hold its shape are temporarily broken, and as the water leaves they re-form in whatever position the strand happens to be sitting in. That is the entire mechanism of a wash-and-go, and it is also the mechanism of a roller set and of the frizz you get from walking home in drizzle. Your hair is not being styled by the cream. It is being styled by how it was arranged at the moment it dried.
Which is why every decision in this style is really a decision about water. Apply too late and the curls have already started setting in a shape you did not choose. Let a section dry out mid-styling and that section will announce itself for the rest of the week.
Our Fermented Rice Water & Ambunu Wash n Go Curling Cream is built for that one narrow job: to go onto soaking wet hair, spread without dragging, and hold the clump together while the water leaves. It is a styling cosmetic and nothing more ambitious than that.
Why 3c hair is both the easy case and the frustrating one
3c hair sits at the tight end of curly and the loose end of coily — corkscrews roughly the width of a pencil or a straw, dense, and with a visible curl pattern even when nothing has been done to it. That last part is why it gets recommended for wash-and-gos. The definition is already there. You are not creating a curl, you are keeping one.
The frustration comes from the same place. A tight corkscrew has a lot of surface area for its length and a cuticle that lifts more readily at every bend, so it gives water up quickly and takes it back on just as quickly from humid air. That is the frizz. It is not a failure of technique so much as an argument you are having with the weather.
Shrinkage is the other thing to make peace with. Hair that dries in a corkscrew reads far shorter than its actual length, and there is nothing wrong when that happens — it is the curl doing exactly what a curl does. I pulled apart the difference between growing hair and keeping it in Chebe Powder For Hair Growth, because the two get blurred constantly and it costs people a lot of money.
Curl-type labels like 3c are, I should say, a marketing shorthand rather than a scientific classification. They are useful for talking to each other about hair and useless for predicting how a given head will behave. Porosity, density and how much damage the ends have taken tell you more.
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What is actually in it: fermented rice water and ambunu
Rice water has one piece of research behind it that gets cited constantly, usually with the details filed off, so let me be precise. In 2010 researchers from a Japanese cosmetics company published an abstract in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science on yu-su-ru — the rinse water left over from washing rice, used on hair in Japan since the Heian period. What they reported was reduced surface friction and improved elasticity in the treated hair fibres.
Read that carefully, because it is about how hair behaves in the hand: less friction, more give. It is not evidence that anything grows. It is also a conference abstract from an industry laboratory rather than an independent trial, which is a reason to hold it loosely rather than to quote it as settled. Fermenting is a separate question again, and I have not seen anything I would call evidence that it changes the outcome — it lowers the pH and it makes the smell considerably worse.
Ambunu is the more interesting half of the formula and the one nobody has heard of. It is the Sahelian name for a plant botanists have shuffled around: Kew’s Plants of the World Online now gives the accepted name as Sesamum sesamoides, with Ceratotheca sesamoides — the name most of us in this trade still print on the label, ours included — recorded as a synonym. Its native range runs across tropical Africa down to Namibia.
It belongs to Pedaliaceae, the sesame family, and the family’s signature is mucilage glands scattered over the leaves and stems that release a slippery gel the moment they meet water. That gel is why the leaves go into soups as a thickener across the Sahel, and it is why they have long been used as a hair rinse — you can buy the whole dried leaves and make the rinse yourself if you would rather. Slip is the entire contribution. It is not doing anything to the inside of the strand.
The rest of a curling cream is humectants and emollients, and those words are worth knowing because they are most of what you are paying for in any product in this category. DermNet’s page on emollients and moisturisers defines humectants as the water-loving ingredients — glycerine being the classic — that attract and hold water, and emollients as the ones that soften and smooth. That page is written about skin rather than hair, but it also makes a point that transfers exactly: emollients work best applied to damp skin. Same principle, same reason, different keratin.
The order of operations, which is where it is usually lost
Wash and condition first, and do the detangling in the shower while the conditioner is still in. The American Academy of Dermatology’s guidance on curly hair care is to wet the hair thoroughly, apply a leave-in, then work through it in sections with your fingers or a wide-tooth comb — and to avoid brushing it dry, which is how you turn a curl into frizz and a tangle into a snapped strand.
Then apply to wet hair, not damp hair. The AAD’s page on everyday care for Black hair says the same: moisturiser or leave-in goes on while the hair is wet. Most disappointing wash-and-gos I have watched people do are disappointing because the hair was towel-dried first and the product went onto a curl that had already decided its own shape.
Work in small sections — smaller than feels reasonable. Four quadrants is not enough on dense 3c hair; you want sections you can see through. Take a section, run the cream through it from root to tip until it feels slippery rather than creamy, and then decide how you are encouraging the clump: raking through with fingers, praying hands, or shingling curl by curl if you have the patience, which I generally do not.
Then the hard part, which is doing nothing. Touching hair while it dries breaks the clumps apart and the shape sets around the disturbance. Let it air dry undisturbed, or diffuse it on low with the dryer held still. And do not fluff the roots until it is completely, properly dry — not nearly dry.
One note on frequency. The AAD suggests washing Black hair about once a week or every other week, partly to avoid product build-up and partly because frequent washing is drying. A wash-and-go is a wash, so if you are redoing it every two days you are washing far more often than that — which is a perfectly reasonable trade to make, as long as you are making it knowingly.
What a curling cream cannot do
It cannot grow your hair. Neither can the rice water in it, and I would rather lose the sale than pretend otherwise — the research on rice rinse water is about friction and elasticity in a fibre, which is a cosmetic measurement, not a follicle one. Anything that genuinely acted on hair growth would be a medicine, and would be regulated as one.
It cannot change your curl pattern. Curl shape is set by the geometry of the follicle, and no cream reaches that. What a good cream does is let the pattern you already have clump and dry without being dragged out of shape, which often looks like a different curl pattern in photographs and is not one.
And it cannot do anything about hair that is actually thinning. If you are seeing more scalp, a widening part, shedding that has genuinely increased, or breakage that arrived suddenly, that belongs with a GP or a dermatologist — there are causes, from iron deficiency to thyroid problems to traction from years of tight styling, that no styling product touches. I went into one of them at length in Iron Deficiency Hair Loss, and the short version is that a blood test tells you more than a shelf of products ever will. Going early is worth more than going late.
If a wash-and-go is not working for you after a few honest attempts, the answer may simply be that your hair does not want to do this style, and that is allowed. Twist-outs and braid-outs set the curl mechanically rather than relying on the pattern to hold itself, and they are far more forgiving of humidity, of thinner sections, and of being touched.
Frequently asked questions
Is a wash-and-go suitable for 3c hair?
Usually yes, and 3c hair is one of the easier patterns for it, because the corkscrews already clump without being persuaded. The difficulty is not getting definition but keeping it — a tight curl loses and regains water quickly, so humidity and frizz are the real opponents. If it is not working after several careful attempts, a twist-out will give you a more predictable result.
Should curling cream go on wet or damp hair?
Wet. Properly soaking, ideally still in or just out of the shower. The AAD’s everyday care guidance for Black hair is explicit that a moisturiser or leave-in should be applied while the hair is wet. Once hair has been towel-dried the curls have begun setting in whatever shape they are in, and product applied then is working against a decision already made.
Does fermented rice water make hair grow?
There is no good evidence that it does. The research people cite is a 2010 abstract in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science reporting reduced surface friction and improved elasticity in hair treated with rice rinse water — measurements of how the fibre behaves, not of growth. It was also industry research rather than an independent trial. Treat rice water as a conditioning ingredient, which is a real thing to be.
Why does my wash-and-go frizz as it dries?
Most often because it was touched. Hair sets in the shape it is in as it loses water, so every time you check it, fluff it or run your hands through, you break a clump and it dries broken. The other common causes are sections that were too large to coat evenly, product applied to hair that was no longer wet, and humid air, which no product fully solves.
How often can you do a wash-and-go?
As often as you are happy to wash, which is the honest catch. The AAD suggests washing Black hair roughly weekly or fortnightly to limit build-up and dryness, and a wash-and-go is by definition a wash. Many people stretch theirs with a satin bonnet at night and a light water mist to revive it, which is a reasonable compromise between definition and not washing every other day.
If there is one thing I would want you to take from this, it is that a wash-and-go is decided by water and by sequence, not by which jar you bought. Wet hair, small sections, even coating, hands off while it dries. Get those four right with almost any decent cream and you will do better than getting them wrong with an expensive one — I know, because I spent a couple of years proving the second half of that sentence.
Our cream earns its place in that sequence for one reason: the ambunu mucilage gives it enough slip to spread through a soaking section without dragging the curl apart. That is a real and useful thing for a styling product to do, and it is the whole of the claim.
Shop the fermented rice water & ambunu wash n go curling cream
Sources
- American Academy of Dermatology. 6 curly hair care tips from dermatologists. AAD.
- American Academy of Dermatology. Black hair: Tips for everyday care. AAD.
- American Academy of Dermatology. 10 hair care habits that can damage your hair. AAD.
- DermNet. Emollients and Moisturisers. DermNet.
- Inamasu, S. et al. The effect of rinse water obtained from the washing of rice (YU-SU-RU) as a hair treatment. International Journal of Cosmetic Science, 2010 (abstract).
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Sesamum sesamoides (Endl.) Byng & Christenh.. Plants of the World Online.
- Ken Fern. Ceratotheca sesamoides. Useful Tropical Plants Database.
Written by Joanna, founder of Jostylin Naturals. This article explains how a wash-and-go works and what is in a curling cream; it is not medical advice and nothing here is a recommendation to start, stop or choose any treatment. Our products are cosmetic ones for hair and skin and are not treatments for hair loss, thinning, scalp conditions or anything else. Hair that is thinning, shedding more than usual or breaking suddenly should be seen by a GP or dermatologist.
