Already have an account?
Get back to the
Beauty

Can You Get Rid of Dry, Brittle Frizz With Dental Floss? We Tried Out This Viral Hack

Warm weather is finally making its way through our neighborhoods, melting icy frosts and encouraging the earliest buds to bloom. While I’ve always loved this change, I know that it marks an end to my good hair days. The heat and humidity reduce my curls to frizzy puffs! With the right products, I can usually get most of my hair to cooperate — except for my roots, where I develop a halo of frizz. If only there were an easy hack for taming those flyaways … and as I just found out: There is. My roots finally met their match in the form of the dental floss.

The trick comes from TikTok influencer Matthew Newman, who runs the account @mattloveshair. In the eight-second video, Newman holds a piece of floss taught and presses it against his scalp, sliding it down over his hair. The results are impressive; his flyaways become smooth and nonexistent. But does this trick really work in real life?

@mattloveshair

one of my FAV #hairhacks is using dental floss for #sleekhair 🦷🦷🦷 #hairvideo

♬ Drop It Like It’s Hot – Snoop Dogg

Testing Out the Viral Dental Floss Hack for Frizz

Upon watching the video and looking in the mirror at my halo of frizz, I immediately ran to the bathroom and picked up my floss. I wrapped a piece around my pointer fingers, held it taught, and slid it across my hair. Nothing happened. Disappointed, I looked for more information online, and found a video of another influencer, Sarah Palmyra, testing it out. Palmyra offered some wise advice in her caption: “Make sure you use floss that has a wax coating.”

I was using unwaxed floss, so I rummaged through the bathroom cabinet for waxed floss instead. When I tried the trick again, I pressed the floss down hard against my head and pulled downward. The extra pressure and the wax coating seemed to help.

I wasn’t fully satisfied, however. Curly roots make this hack a little tricky, because they curve in different directions and don’t give flyaways much to stick to. So, I lightly sprayed the top of my head with hairspray — I used an all-natural one from Innersense Organic Beauty (Buy from Innersense, $26) — and pressed down with the floss once more. This worked like a charm.

What hair type will benefit the most from this trick?

The dental floss trick should work well for women who have straight or wavy hair and struggle to tame frizz and flyaways. Frizz at the root is a particularly difficult problem for women over 40, as their hair may become dry and brittle due to age and frequent coloring. Dental floss makes for an easy solution and a very inexpensive one. (Just think about how expensive anti-frizz products are these days.)

Of course, dental floss is not a substitute for proper hair care. Dry, frizzy hair needs a healthy balance of moisture and protein to restore its strength. To learn how to reinstate moisture into your hair, check out these tips.

And even though this trick took a little time and finesse to work, I certainly plan to use it this spring. It’s a much better solution than using my hands to press down frizz, which is what I used to do!

Use left and right arrow keys to navigate between menu items. Use right arrow key to move into submenus. Use escape to exit the menu. Use up and down arrow keys to explore. Use left arrow key to move back to the parent list.