The consistency of your hair is something that you are born with and cannot be changed, intrinsically. Though you might have noticed that some people are able to change the consistency of their hair from curly to straight, this is not really a permanent solution and involves a certain amount of hair damage in the process. This is a decision that you will have to make – whether you want really unhealthy hair that breaks off as you comb it, thus resulting in repeated visits to a parlor, or whether you would like to maintain the health of your hair.
Hair is quite a complex material. Fundamentally, it is made up of a type of protein called keratin. This protein is distributed all over our body – in our skin, nails, and hair. In fact, hair and nails are completely made up of keratin but they are molecularly strung together a bit differently and therefore the difference in consistency. Keratin is quite strong. It is protein that is made up of polymer cross-linked disulfide bonds and this makes it extremely strong. How much the hair curls is a product of genetics and how the keratin is created in the skin. There is no way that this process can be altered. It is believed that curly hair has its evolutionary uses in ensuring that too much sunlight doesn’t penetrate within the skin; however, this is a use that humans as an indoor species don’t require anymore.
Straightening hair cannot be done naturally and you would need the help of specialized chemicals called relaxers. What these chemicals do is to breakdown the disulfide bonds of hair thus leaving the hair free to fall straight. This sounds pretty easy but the trade off is that one ends up with very weak hair. The other problem is that new hair that grows won’t follow the pattern of old hair and you will end up having to chemically “relax” the new hair as well. Over a period of time, this will ruin your hair to the point where it will simply break right off in your hands. You could instead try to remove some of the oil in your hair that will cause the hair to lose water content. This can be done by simply shampooing more often and clearing the oil out of your hair. The drawback of this is that your scalp will start to secrete more oil to compensate for the loss leading to an unending cycle.