Pasta strainer hair diffuser: God help me, I did the stupid TikTok thing and it worked.

One day last week, a friend complimented my hair. She wanted to know if I’d done something different to it.

“Actually,” I told her—knowing full well how ridiculous I sounded, and if I’m being honest, kind of reveling in it—“I used a pasta strainer on it.”

A few days before, I’d come across a video on TikTok of a woman using a mesh strainer to dry her wavy hair. By scooping sections of her hair into the strainer and training a blow dryer on it, she had fashioned a makeshift diffuser out of an everyday kitchen tool—a diffuser being a special attachment you put on a blow dryer, or else an entirely separate device, for the purpose of drying curly hair. Twenty-three million people watched this video. Because I’ve had good, life-changing even, experiences with internet hair hacks in the past, I knew right away I wanted to try it. Remember that time a New Yorker writer used a Dyson Airwrap, aka the most luxe blow dryer on the market, to roast a chicken? I would be her thrifty-gal inverse.

I can’t tell the difference between genius and crazy anymore lol #wavyhairtips #hairhacks #plopping #hairproblems #diffusecurlyhair #foxcraftcustom

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I’m one of those people you sometimes hear about and maybe write off as fictional who didn’t know I had curly hair until I was well into adulthood. How, multiple people have asked me, could you not know a thing like that? I don’t have a good answer. No one ever told me! I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to brush my hair. Then one day when I was stuck at home in 2020, I decided to try plopping, a method of wrapping your hair up after you wash it to bring out its natural curl, and the rest is history (hairstory?)—as well as a bit of a white lady cliché. This explains why I didn’t already know about pasta-strainer diffusing from the first time it went viral, in 2017, back when I still thought I had straight hair. It’s tragic, really, how late I was to the party. Now I see people on the street with hair as frizzy as mine used to be and it takes all my willpower not to hold on-the-spot interventions for them.

In the years since, I’ve overcorrected and made having curly hair my whole personality. (Well, technically my hair is wavy—I know people get testy about these distinctions.) I’ve also fallen deep into the curly hair internet. I have friends who have always worn their hair curly, but who aren’t as wedded to TikTok and the internet as I am, who look at me askance when I talk about plopping, never mind more advanced concepts like “the bowl method,” “squish to condish,” and “scrunch out the crunch.” These people would definitely think I was insane for using a pasta strainer on my hair.

I had my reasons. Because of my relatively late-in-life conversion to the curly hair lifestyle, I’ve never tried diffusing, but I have become diffuser-curious lately. And while I don’t own a diffuser, I do just so happen to own a cheap, decade-old pasta strainer whose plastic handle I partially melted a few years ago, which is to say, a kitchen tool I knew I would not miss if using it on my hair took it out of cooking commission.

On the day I tried pasta-strainer diffusing, I started with a version of my usual hair routine: shampoo and conditioner in the shower, then leave-in conditioner, curl crème, and gel right after I got out, followed by half an hour or so of plopping with a microfiber towel. (Back when I thought I had straight hair, the idea of using hair product at all, let alone multiple products, would have confounded me.) From there, I usually let my hair air-dry, which can take several hours—but this time, I picked up my hair dryer with one hand and my pasta strainer with the other.

I had watched several videos of women pasta-strainering their hair, but we’ve all got varying amounts of hair, not to mention varying sizes of strainers, so some willingness to adapt is necessary. I found the process of doing my hair in sections pretty intuitive, and not unlike how I divide up scrunching my hair before a plop: First I would catch the ends of a section of hair in the pasta strainer before cupping it to my head, letting the hair scrunch up inside it. Then I would hold it to my head with one hand, try to flip the rest of my hair elsewhere if it was in the way, and use my hair dryer to blow cool air on it with the other hand.

It took about 20 minutes to dry it all. I felt a bit like Johnny Appleseed as I watched myself in the mirror, looking like I was wearing a pasta strainer as a hat, but that’s not a bad thing: Drying your hair with a kitchen tool is absurd, and that’s half the reason to do it.

The other half of the argument for doing it is that it really works. This wasn’t one of those TikTok hacks that kinda-sorta worked in a way that made you go “huh!” but that you would never actually use in your day to day; it legitimately worked. My curls were well defined, and I loved the volume. The hair was a little frizzy at the top, which I attributed to having bad aim with my hair dryer and probably accidentally blowing some hair that wasn’t in the strainer at times. But I honestly think my hair has never looked better. Your results may vary, but I’ve since spoken to two other people who have had good results with it. As they might say on TikTok: This is your sign to dry your hair with a pasta strainer.

My only slight fear around the pasta strainer was that it might lead to heat damage. I’ve learned that diffusing isn’t as bad for your hair as other methods of heat styling, but there’s understandably not a whole lot of research out there about the effects of pasta strainers. E! spoke to “experts” who recommended against it, but they were experts who had a vested interest in selling diffusers, so I’m not sure how much stock I’d put in their advice.

In the spirit of scientific inquiry, I should admit that I wasn’t quite as in love when I tried strainer-drying my hair again a few days after my first try. I let my hair air-dry for a little longer, and because of that I think I didn’t get as much volume. I’m aware of the inherent ridiculousness of that complaint—ugh, I didn’t get as much volume when I used a pasta strainer to diffuse my hair the second time!—and the general need to check myself before I become a narcissist who’s even more obsessed with my hair than I already was. That, more than heat damage, may be the real risk of using a strainer on your hair. Don’t get me wrong, I will do it again. But for now, I’m going to take a break—and run my pasta strainer through the dishwasher.