InStyler: The Magic Hair Styling Tool
InStyler
So… Hi. I’m not Britt. I’m Donna. I love to give unsolicited opinions, so the idea of reviewing products really appeals to me. When Britt asked for volunteers to do reviews, I jumped at the chance. I write at phatDonna and you can follow me on Twitter.
As many of you out there know, pregnancy does some weird stuff to your body. Your vision can change, your feet can grow, you start to love/hate foods you used to hate/love. I actually lost the feeling in the top of my right thigh. That’s a true story. It came back eventually, in case you were curious.
For me, the most annoying and lasting remnant of pregnancy is wavy hair. I used to have stick-straight hair that I went to heroic measures to curl in the 80s and 90s. Spiral perms, hot rollers, curling irons… I’m surprised my hair is still speaking to me after my junior high years. But in spring of 2007, I discovered that my hair now has this weird little wave to it. Not enough that it would be cute if I let it air dry, either. Just enough to look like I maybe had gotten a bit too friendly with an electrical socket. And so I found myself in the novel position of needing a flat iron in order to keep my hair straight.
I tried a couple of flat irons and I guess they worked OK, but I could never achieve the results I wanted, or to get it to look the way my hairdresser could. One day, I saw the TV commercial for the InStyler Rotating Hot Iron. I was immediately intrigued because I love to try things that fall into that “As Seen on TV!” category. It promised an awful lot, but I wasn’t convinced it would be worth the price and they only sold them in twos. Then a friend mentioned that she had one and loved it. She always looks amazing and that was enough to convince me. I bought mine from HauteLook, but it’s also available on Amazon and other places that don’t require you to buy two, because I can’t for the life of me figure out why any one person would need two of them.
The InStyler is different from a flat iron in that on one side, it has a barrel that resembles a curling iron that rotates. The other side has bristles like a brush. So when you use it to straighten, you are smoothing and straightening at the same time, not just pressing the hair together. I notice this advantage the most at the ends. With a regular flat iron, no matter how hard I tried to keep the motion going all the way to the ends, I ended up with wonky ends, especially on my right side. I don’t have that issue at all with the InStyler.
With the InStyler, you can straighten, flip your hair up, flip it under, and even curl your hair. I am finally able to create those awesome Tina Fey waves that I love so much. Even if you already have beautifully straight hair (I hate you, by the way) you can use the InStyler as a curling iron to create body and volume at the roots. I’m telling you, this thing is magical.
My one complaint is that the barrel is hot (duh!) which can make it hard to wrap your hair around it to get curls. My InStyler came with a detachable plastic guard that you can use to hold onto, and that works great for me when I straighten, but kind of gets in the way when I want to use it as a curling iron. I took it off when I tried using it to curl, and burned my fingers a tiny bit. I am sure that is just because I haven’t worked out the right curling technique. As I said, I mainly use it straighten.
Now comes the best part! I bought my own InStyler, but when I emailed them to let them know I was doing a review, they very kindly offered up an InStyler for one lucky reader! How awesome is that? To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment and answer this:
What is the meanest thing you ever did to your hair in the name of fashion?
Submit your comment by Monday, September 20th. We’ll draw a random number on Tuesday, September 21 and the winner will be contacted by email.
Omg!! I so badly want one of these!!! They are kinda pricey and I can’t being myself to spend the money on something for my hair. But it’s totally on my christmas list! Because it’s totally ok for my hubby, errr, I mean santa to spend the money on something for my hair.
The meanest thing I did to my hair? Easy! When I was a Jr. In highschool, I got my naturally curly hair straighten. Like a reverse perm. Oh. My. Gosh. It ruined my hair for years to come and I’m not sure it’s ever truly recovered. It fried my hair and made it a hot mess. It wouldn’t go staight nor be back to curly. And talk about frizzy!! That’s all my hair was, a big frizz ball!!
I’m glad today my hair has almost forgiven me, and there are times I try to wear it straight and it works out ok, I guess? Which is why I need this! If it can straighten *MY* hair and make it look smooth and shiny and pretty, it would be a mircle worker!
But since the reverse perm straighter mishap in highschool, my hair has gone back to it’s curly roots- no pun intended – and it works with me most days. But some days I think it remembers what I did and pays me back three fold.
My mom let me get a perm in the 4th grade… that was definitely the worst
@Amanda, Oh my mom GAVE me a home perm when I was in 4th grade and it was horrendous. And then? I let her talk me into it again in 7th grade! After that I refused the home perms because clearly, my mom is not good at giving them.
One horrifying weekend home from college, I let my mon talk me into letting me highlight my hair immediately after I had let her talk me into giving me a perm. I had just gone through a break up and she wanted to make me feel better. Fail! The highlights actually frosted my hair, turning me from a brunette to a blond. That only helped highlight (cruel irony) the fact that my short hair was now even shorter thanks tona super tight perm. God, I was horrible! Then I remembered I had to take this look back to college, so that made me cry harder! I looked like Billy Idol’s destitute grandmother. Never got another perm!
I think the meanest thing I ever did to my hair was have it bleached, then dyed strawberry blonde. I am a dark brunette so we went clearrrrr to the other end of the color spectrum with that one! It was over a year before my hair stopped feeling all coarse-ish… but at least I found out that blondes don’t *really* have more fun than brunettes!
PS: I’d LOVE one of these InStylers. I have SUPER naturally curly hair (think: Britt-like). And have a devil of a time getting my hair straight and staying that way. Please, Random.org (or whatever) pick me, pick me!!! =)
Worst thing I have ever done to my hair? How about 4 processes in 1 day? It went like this… I want to save some money, I’ll touch up my color myself. A nice drug store brand should do. Holy cow, the color didn’t lift enough, I shall try again. Still not enough lift and I’m beginning to look like bozo the clown. I shall cover the entire mess with a darker (much) color. Holy shit! Hair only grabbed green! My hair is now the color of pencil lead. Must fix! Have to work in the morning! Greetings bleach soap cap, are you here to save my life??
4 processes in five hours. My hair ended up somewhere between Billy Idol and Annie Lenox. The good news was I didn’t need a haircut for months, I could just break the ends off whenever I was looking shaggy. Home haircolor FAIL!!
It’s a toss up between all the spiral perms and the excessive use of AquaNet in the 80s. How my hair didn’t fall out or catch fire is beyond me.
Also, Donna was kind enough to let me borrow this very InStyler and is indeed quite fabulous!!!
Hey, Donna!
Well, if it can be done to hair, I’ve done it! I’ve had color, bleach (all over), highlights, perms, straighteners and even extensions! My hair is fine and pretty thin but as long as it’s damaged in some way, it looks fuller and thicker. I’m a hairdresser so I’m always using my own head as a guinea pig for new products that come out on the market! I’d love to have the InStyler to use in my salon! I had a client bring one in so I could try it out on her hair and let me tell you… Who needs a “Bump-It” when you have the InStyler?? Nobody! I am in love with how easy it was to achieve Big Texas Hair on her.
So, yeah… PICK ME!!!
Worst thing I ever did to my hair was a perm – I don’t even know what made me do it, but I regretted it completely. My feelings were not helped when my grandma saw it for the first time, in the middle of our church lobby, and practically screamed “What did you do to your hair? Your BEAUTIFUL VIRGIN HAIR?”
I never got another perm.
I’ve always wanted to try one of those. Great review!
I’ve done a lot of terrible things to my hair too. But the worst was in college. I let a friend of mine cut and color it. I went from long, dark brown hair to chin length blond. But since my friend was a biology major, not a hair stylist, every strand was the same length. As in two inches. All over my head.
And the blond wasn’t so much blond as orangish. I have one picture of it as a reminder to never let someone cut my hair who has never even trimmed a dog. *shudder*
Now the obligatory “Pick Me!”
Two words: msll bangs
Two more words: Rave hairspray
I’ve seen this InStyler used by Donna on her gorgeous hair and was very impressed!
You mean other than perming my hair to death and the home frosting kits that required me to pull my long hair through tee-tiny holes to achieve that framed “sun-kissed” look around my face? I would have to say my poor decision to use Sun In. And no, I didn’t learn my lesson the first time. Indeed I did not. I used it THREE times. The last time, I sported a nice alien look with my dirty dishwater natural color, the orange youthful glow of the Sun In aaaand Chlorine green from swimming. I was a hawt mess. HAWT I tell ya……
The worst is a spiral perm.
Meanest thing I have photographic evidence of? Sleeping on foam rollers the night before my 2nd grade picture. Or maybe it’s the fact that I had a “Dorothy Hamil” haircut the year before which really made me and the cute boy across the street look like brothers.
But the daily wash/blowdry/hot rollers/curling iron and Rave routine in the late 80s probably did the most damaage.
Great review! I have always wanted to try one of these! I went from bright red to platinum blonde…in one sitting. For some reason the brilliant colorist thought that she could get away with bleaching my hair 3x in a row. I ended up with blisters all over my head and 15 inches of hair the consistency of gum.
Oooh, the InStyler! I love hair gadgets that actually work!
I have been especially cruel to my hair over the years.
Including: letting a friend cut it with fingernail scissors to give it a “textured” look,
The afro home perm (spiral fail),
Jersey Hair in the 80′s,
Accidentally using speed bleach to try to achieve the perfect platinum(This became known as my “mange” look),
another perm so bad that my boss asked me to go home,
and one of my favorites, trying to add reddish lowlights to my already highlighted hair which resulted in pink splotches.
Meanest thing done to my hair? Definitely a spiral perm followed by incessant teasing and hair-spraying of my bangs daily to achieve 2-3″ height during the middle school years.
I’m sitting here racking my brain to come up with the meanest thing I’ve done to my curly hair over the years and besides highlighting and straightening it way too much, I’ve got nothing. I was never very creative with my hair and I guess that worked out for me. I definitely want to try the InStyler though!
In college I had huge bangs that started at the crown of my head and really long hair. I shellacked those bangs every morning so they wouldn’t move. I have pictures.
I had what is still referred to by my friends as the “Wall of bangs” at far too young an age.
The worst thing I ever did to my hair was get it dyed for the first time at age 32. I asked for red, it came out carrot orange. gah. I hated it so much I went back and demanded that they make me a raven redhead despite my light skintone, and that looked amazing, but my virgin hair is permanently damaged for the few times I had it dyed and that makes me sad.
I also have a slight wave in my hair, despite no babies. At a certain length it just waves slightly. I love the idea of this product!
I was the queen of crimping. Why we chose to do this to our hair, I have no idea. Then I discovered I could add straight peroxide to my shampoo and the heat from the hair drier would give me the perfect shade of blonde. So I crimped and peroxided my hair for one horrible year in the 80s. My hair has finally forgiven me, I think.
Since my hair is so oily, I used to think that I shouldn’t use conditioner. Needless to say, when I started flat ironing my hair every day, I completely fried my hair! And not just a little bit…
Now I use conditioner – mostly something light like a detangler – so that I’ll never do that again!
MOMMA WANT!!
Like a few other people said, I haven’t been able to bring myself to spend the money on something for my hair, especially now that I work from home and my biggest critic still craps his pants.
I would first like to state for the record that my mother did this to me in the late 80s when I was 7ish – I did not do it to myself! Can we say…feathered bangs?! EEKS!!
The meanest thing I ever did to my hair was procreate. Man do I need this thing.
Back in the 80s, I used to buy “party perms” … like a perm without the solution. So I’d sit there with rollers in for HOURS, trying to have curly hair. But not wanting the commitment. Why? Why why why?! Now my hair is wavy, probably as punishment, lol.
When I was 13, I joined a band. The guitarist and I decided one weekend we would do something radical and “rockstar” to our hair. Mine was shaved on the sides (like the girl from Bow Wow Wow). Then it was bleached in horizontal gradients so it was dark brown on top and almost pure white on the ends. Then we washed it in grape koolaid. I thought it was so cool, but mom didn’t agree and made me cut off all my hair and start over. =( I still long for that purple hair. LOL
The worst thing I ever did was go for highlights and let her use the cap with the crochet hook after she assured me it would be awesome. She way overblonded me, ironic since I am almost toally blond now, and I actually cried. Then she tried to fix it and turned it red. I ended up cutting about 10 inches off and had the worst hair ever for over a year. *shudder*
I permed my hair after years(20+) of having straight straight hair that would never keep any curl for longer than an hour. The next day I bought a perm and used it to straighten my hair back. Two perm products in two days – I was crazy but didn’t know better at the time and hated that perm!!
I let my mother cut my hair when I was in 6th grade, into a mushroom top cut and then I let her perm it. I was told that it looked like I went through a tornado. I have had long hair ever since.
I absolutely LOVE this review site.
ANYWAY… I have naturally wavy, coarse, dry hair, as I am biracial, I got the interesting parts of hair from both parents.
When I was young and didn’t know how to blow dry my own hair, my mom would do it once a week, tugging and pulling and overdrying and it would get SUPER FRIZZY.
However, to this day, SHE still says (and I agree) that the worst, meanest thing she’s ever done to my hair was give me bangs. They were cute the first two days, but after that they were hard to tame and keep in check. Even with hair product, I would inevitably have hair sticking up all over.
Since then, I’ve grown them out, but I still keep them trimmed just in case I want to have a different look… But, oh Lord, I didn’t need them as a kid.
OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHH I have wanted to try this ever since it came out and I saw the infomercial. The meanest thing I ever did to my hair was continually getting a perm from age 12-16ish and during the last couple of years, in addition to the perm, taking the hard hold hair spray and spraying my bangs straight up while blow drying! Whew….those were the days!!!!
Pregnancy effed up my hair too! The worst thing I ever did to my hair was to try to perm it in the eighth grade. It was beautifully stick straight then – so straight that the perm didn’t really take. One side was curly and the other was kind of wavy. It was bad. Thank goodness for ponytails!
Donna, i know exactly what you mean. since having my son six years ago, i now wake up to this beach-wave thingy (that everyone else seems to think is beautiful), and i want to puke. i spend so much time using my flat-iron to get that perfectly straight and no-volume flat hair that i always loved.
every once in a great while i’ll experiment and try to create volume but to my dismay, my dearest Revlon flat-iron decides to put a kink right at the root and then i look like a dufus with a weird crooked part down the middle of my head.
last year i saw an infomercial about the InStyler and of course added it to my Christmas Wish List. I awoke on Christmas morning finding a stocking full of chocolate and a new Bath and Body Works bubble bath with a note attached: “Merry Christmas. The Instyler is too expensive.”
::sigh:: so i decided this year it’s definitely going to be a personal gift to myself IF i get a Christmas bonus.
How long have you been using the Instyler? I looked at one several months ago, but there were so many bad reviews online. Many people stated their’s started falling apart and were useless after minimal usage.
@Jennifer, I have had it since July. I also read those reviews and I was a bit confused by them, because it seems pretty sturdy to me. I mean, if you drop it often I could see it breaking. It IS made mostly of plastic just like any curling or flat iron.
I use it about every other day and have had no issues so far.
Bleach. The end.
Wash and wear perm in fourth grade. And then proceeded to only wash. and. wear. Looked like a sheep dog. Someone should have stopped me…
I got a spiral perm in 8th grade but asked them to leave my bangs straight so that I could crimp them. And I did crimp my bangs and also moussed my spiral perm for about half a year.
My hair was STRAIGHT straight straight (until puberty – then, ringlets) but I digress….I too fell victim of the “home perm.” This one administered by my Mom’s friend & our neighbor (Trudy). Ay yi yi. I have never seen a 4th grader with a more “old lady” hairdo than me. egads! How embarrassing. Numerous other home perms (! how could I let this happen) & a few ‘professional’ perms followed until the aforementioned hormonal craziness struck. My hair got straighter & straighter again throughout college/young adult life but with both pregnancies got curlier & curlier & I’m now back to ringlets which I would REALLY enjoy straightening once in a while….because I know my 2 1/2 year old & baby would appreciate me not looking the same every single day. (haha).
I’ve done lots of things to my hair over the years… the worst being.. In 2000 letting a friend strip my jet black hair and then dye honey blond lets just say that got old very fast!
I want one. I WANT.
I’m also an “as seen on tv” junkie.
meanest thing ever.. I let my mom give me a home perm and then rode my bike before it had set.
she re-did it.
umm
there are no words.
dammit, i got to this too late. would have loved to have won this as i also have lusted a bit over it while watching late night / early AM infomercials. so glad to read that it works as advertised. thanks for the honest review!
Will this keep my wife out of the salon
@Tim, Well its great after long sweaty workouts my hair seems not to break
The Instyler is truly a got to have product.
Got the instyler for my wife and she is loving it