TikTok’s New Beauty Hack Involves Drying Your Hair With A Pasta Strainer

There’s no way of scrolling on TikTok for more than five minutes before coming across yet another new makeup or beauty trend. And this time, it involves hair and a pasta strainer or sieve. Yes, you read that right. TikToker Liz Fox Roseberry (@foxcraftcustom) has claimed that a plain old strainer has worked better than a diffuser on her curls, and hundreds of other users have leapt to try it out.

Before you roll your eyes and dismiss it as yet another questionable technique, just know that the original TikTok already has over 22.5 million views (and counting), spawning tonnes of stitched videos trying the hack for themselves. The top reaction video itself has also already garnered 156,200 likes. Roseberry posted a clip of herself drying her hair with a strainer on Jan. 16, captioned: “Just learned that my pasta strainer is better at diffusing my waves than my diffuser.” She films herself drying her hair flipped upside down and resting in a strainer, before it cuts to the strainer being lifted off to reveal full, tousled curls.

Of course, interest was immediately piqued, with user @maggieod915 commenting, “I’ve learned more from TikTok than high school and college combined.” After going viral, Roseberry then posted a more in-depth tutorial teaching viewers her exact method of diffusing curly hair.

“Basically what I did — and I think it’s an important step — is doing ‘the plop method’,” she said. Wavy or curly haired girlies will already know that this involves scrunching wet hair to encourage curls or ringlets to form, applying curl cream and other products, and “plopping” the hair onto a towel or t-shirt so the curls are held in place when the fabric is secured around the head.

When it comes to the blow drying, Roseberry simply gathered her hair and placed it all in her sieve while bent over. She recommended drying the roots first, then blow drying the lengths through the sieve by placing large sections of hair and holding the sieve up close to the scalp to maintain the waves.

In follow-up videos, Roseberry addressed some common responses and misconceptions from all the people trying the hack. One such mistake is using plastic strainers. “You gotta use the mesh ones, or at least one that has a lot of holes, so the air can blow,” she exclaimed.