TikTok Convinced Me to Curl My Hair With a Soda Can

I mean it when I say I will try any beauty hack that goes viral on the Internet. So you better believe that when I saw people using a can (yes, an aluminum beverage can) to curl their hair, I had to try it to see if it worked. 

To give you some context, people all over TikTok and Instagram (including myself) are putting a piece of their hair into a can, swirling it around, putting a hot blow dryer into the can, and pulling out the hair to reveal a perfectly curled piece of hair. I first saw the trend on TikToker Jonathan K Monroe’s page, who claimed the can curled his hair to perfection. I mean, it literally looked like he used a curling iron. After being one of the 2.5 million viewers on his video, it was time for me to try it out. 

I’ll be honest, prior to trying I was convinced it wasn’t going to work. But I put on my beauty editor shoes and gave it a go. First things first, I washed the can out because the last thing I wanted was sticky hair. Keep in mind if you do try this at home be extremely careful when cleaning it out since the edges are sharp. 

To start the process, I sectioned my hair off and inserted a small piece from the front into the can. Once my ends were in, I twisted the can upwards until it landed close to my roots. At this point, the full piece of hair was inside the can. I took my Dyson Airwrap with the blow dry attachment on its hottest setting and began to, literally, blow dry the outside of the soda can. 

In the videos I saw, there were no clear directions on how long to hold the heat to the can, so I just blow-dried the can until it got too hot to hold. Once that happened, I slowly pulled the can away from my hair, and well, to say I was shocked would be an understatement. The can of Coke created not just any curl but the perfect curl. 

Now that I had been proven wrong, I had to know how the hell this is possible. I checked in with New York City-based hairstylist Nicole Rolleri for the answers. “The reason this works is due to the heat hitting the can with your hair in it, the hot air is blowing in one singular direction, the same way it would blow to activate a curl with a hot tool,” she says. Rolleri adds that a pro tip for this would be to hit the can with cold hair after the hot air. “This will give you a longer-lasting curl.”