How I deal with frizz when caught in the rain

Living in Australia means I have basically given up on the idea of a predictable weather forecast. One minute I am strolling past the cafés in Fitzroy with my hair behaving itself, and the next a dark band of cloud rolls in from Port Phillip Bay and unloads itself on my head before I have finished my flat white. Brisbane afternoons in summer are especially brutal for this: I walk out of Westfield feeling fine, and by the time I reach the bus stop the air has already turned into thick, sticky soup. I have lost count of how many times I have been caught in Melbourne, Sydney, and along the coastal walk near Bondi without an umbrella, and I have learned the hard way that my hair pays the price every single time.

Humidity and hair have a complicated relationship, and it is rarely a friendly one. The cuticle lifts, the strands swell, and suddenly the sleek blow-dry I did that morning looks like I styled it with a Van de Graaff generator. Once I reach a tram or an air-conditioned office afterwards, the puffed-up texture sets in, and I am stuck with it for the rest of the day.

This is the routine I have built up over years of small, soggy disasters. None of it requires an umbrella, a hood, or even a particularly prepared morning. It is simply a set of habits, products, and small styling tricks I reach for when the weather ambushes me, and it has rescued my hair more times than I want to count.

Why Australian weather turns my hair into a puffball

Australian weather rarely commits. Melburnians joke about four seasons in one day, and having lived through a 14-degree morning turn into a 30-degree afternoon with hail, I do not find it funny. Sydney gets dramatic coastal showers rolling in off the Tasman Sea unannounced. Perth's winter cold fronts can dump a month's worth of rain in an afternoon. Even Adelaide has surprised me more than once with a gust that turned my commute into a wet, fuzzy mess.

The science behind it is simple. Hair is porous, and humid air makes the strands swell, lifting the outer cuticle and creating the fuzzy halo. Rapid temperature changes make it worse: stepping from a wet, warm street into air-conditioning locks the swollen shape in place. Add wind into the mix and the puffball is essentially guaranteed.

Australian summers make this more intense because the dew point stays high well into the evening. Brisbane has that relentless sticky quality, and any styling product I apply by 9am feels useless by lunchtime. My routine has to be built around the assumption that I will eventually get rained on, not the optimistic hope that I will not.

The first five minutes after the first drop hits

The moment I realise I am not making it indoors dry, I switch into damage control. Squeezing water out with my hands is the worst thing I can do — friction roughs up the cuticle. Instead, I press my palms flat against the longest sections and hold them there, letting moisture transfer onto my skin. Pressing always beats rubbing.

The second thing I do is stop touching my hair altogether. The shorter pieces around my face curl up the second they get a drop of moisture, and my instinct is always to flatten them down. But every time I run my fingers through, I am pushing the cuticle open further and inviting more frizz to settle in. I keep my hands in my pockets, hold my bag with both straps, or pretend to be very interested in my phone screen until I can get somewhere dry.

If I have a hair tie on me, I twist my hair into a low bun at the nape of my neck right away. This is not a cute, intentionally messy bun. It is a wet, slightly defeated bun I am wearing because it is the only way to stop every strand from doing its own thing. A loose plait works just as well if the hair is long enough. Anything that keeps the strands clumped together and lifted off my neck is better than letting them wave around in the humidity while I wait for the next tram.

Bag-friendly smoothing tricks I have tested in real life

My bag is already stuffed with Australian summer essentials — sunscreen, a reusable water bottle, my Myki card for Melbourne's trams, sunglasses I inevitably leave on café tables — so I do not carry a fully stocked hair kit. What I do carry are a few small items that fit inside a pouch the size of my palm, and they actually make a difference.

The first is a travel-sized leave-in conditioner, of which I keep a 30 ml bottle in my work bag. A pea-sized amount smoothed through the mid-lengths and ends after blotting makes a real difference, filling in the gaps the rain opened up in the cuticle and helping the strands lie flatter. A few drops of plain face moisturiser can do a similar job in a pinch — humectants in many moisturisers work on hair the same way.

A small metal comb is my other quiet weapon. After blotting — with a scarf, a tote bag, my sleeve if desperate — I run the comb through the lengths only, never from the roots. Combing wet hair from the roots shreds it and creates more flyaways. I prefer metal to plastic because plastic creates static, though a wooden wide-tooth comb works brilliantly, it just does not fold small enough for my bag.

If I happen to be at a café or in someone's home when the rain hits, I have been known to ask for a small amount of olive oil from the kitchen. A drop smoothed over the ends can take a frizzy halo down to a soft wave in about five minutes. It smells faintly of salad, but it works, and it is one of those old tricks my mum used to reach for when we lived through tropical storms up north.

My styling switch-up on days when the forecast looks sketchy

If I know there is a chance of a storm in advance, and in Sydney in particular the Bureau of Meteorology always seems to issue one of those broad "shower or two" warnings, I make small adjustments to how I do my hair in the morning. I wash it the night before instead of in the morning, because hair that has had time to settle into its natural shape is more resilient than hair that has just been manipulated with heat. Day-old hair also holds styles better, which means whatever frizz I do get is easier to manage afterwards.

I lean on anti-humidity products. Australian brands are very good at this. Alpha-H makes a finishing spray without the crispy feel of older formulas. I have a soft spot for Aesop, the Melbourne-born brand, even though I only treat myself to one of their bottles at a time. Sukin is another go-to when I want something gentler, and it is widely stocked at Priceline, which feels like a very Australian sentence to say out loud.

Heat is the other adjustment. If I blow-dry, I finish with a cool shot to seal the cuticle down before I leave. If I straighten, I keep the temperature as low as my hair allows. The smoother the cuticle is when I step outside, the harder humidity finds a grip. I also avoid touching my hair once styled, which sounds obvious, but I am a face-fiddler by nature and it is the first habit I retrain every humid morning.

What I wear when the sky looks threatening

Rain affects more than hair. It affects what sits on my shoulders and how the whole outfit survives the transition from wet pavement to air-conditioned office. I have made peace with the fact that some things just do not work on high-humidity days, and I plan outfits around the forecast now in a way I never used to.

Hoods and scarves create friction frizz. Hats and caps are worse, because wet fabric on wet hair is a recipe for breakage. The best thing for me is a structured outer layer I can throw on and that I will also actually wear once I arrive. While browsing sewing guides I came across a wool blazer pattern I am now half-tempted to make for transitional weather. Wool suiting is not what most people think of for rain, but a heavier fabric keeps the shoulders drier and the cut holds its shape even when everything underneath has gone fluffy.

Shoes matter too, but that is a whole separate rant. I will just say that leather soles and a wet pavement do not get along, and leave it at that.

After the rain: skin, scalp, and the quiet recovery phase

Once I am finally indoors, dried off, and staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, the recovery starts. The first thing I do is rinse my hair with cool water for a minute or two to flush out any grime the rainwater has picked up along the way. Sydney's tap water is generally fine, but rainwater is not as clean as I used to assume, and a quick rinse reduces any scalp irritation that tends to crop up an hour or so later.

Scalp care is the part I used to skip. A friend mentioned an article about a Singaporean line I had never heard of, and I ended up reading this local skincare brand review one evening when I could not sleep. It shifted how I think about leave-on products more broadly, including my scalp. A light, fragrance-free serum along my part line after a rainy day has made a noticeable difference in how my scalp feels the next morning, and I have folded it into my weekly routine.

After that, I treat my face the way I do after any humid day — a gentle cleanse, a hydrating mist, a layer of moisturiser, and SPF reapplied if I am heading back out the door. The full recovery takes about ten minutes, which is nothing compared to the several hours of bad hair I would otherwise be dealing with.

Drop your own frizz survival tip below — I am always collecting new tricks, especially anything from the tropics up in Cairns during the wet season, the dry storms out in regional New South Wales, or the coastal squalls down in Fremantle. We cannot control the weather, but we can absolutely share notes on how to survive it with our hair intact.