There is no more reliable way to ruin a fresh haircut in Canggu than to put a helmet on within thirty minutes of leaving the barbershop. You can have the crispest fade, the most perfectly textured top, and the best styling job in the world, and fifteen minutes on the main road in a half-face helmet will turn it into something that looks like you slept on a couch.
Helmet hair is unavoidable to some degree. If you ride a scooter every day, your hair is going to do things. But there are ways to make it less bad, and ways to fix it in thirty seconds when you arrive where you're going.
Before you put the helmet on
The most effective helmet hair fixes happen before you even get on the bike.
1. Let it cool down first. A freshly cut and styled haircut is still warm when you leave the chair. The product hasn't set yet, and the hair is still malleable. Give it ten or fifteen minutes before you put a helmet on it. Sit outside and have a coffee, walk around the block, anything that lets the product dry and the hair cool. Five minutes of patience saves you an hour of frustration later.
2. Don't overdo the product before a ride. A heavy layer of paste under a hot helmet turns into a paste helmet. You're basically casting your hair in the shape of the lining. A light amount of product, or even none at all if you're going straight home, works better. Apply the rest when you arrive.
3. The chin-tuck technique. This sounds silly until you try it. Tuck your chin down to your chest before you lower the helmet onto your head. It lifts the hair on the front away from your forehead so it doesn't get pressed flat. Then once the helmet is on, tilt your head back and forward a couple of times. It doesn't solve everything, but it prevents the worst of the front-flatness.
When you take it off
Okay, you've arrived. You take the helmet off and you look in the reflection of a shop window. It's not great. Here's what to do next.
Sea salt spray is the only product you need. Keep a small travel bottle in your bag or under your scooter seat — here is what to buy. Two or three spritzes all over, then ruffle it with your fingers. The salt reactivates whatever product was left and gives the hair enough texture to stand up again. It won't be exactly the same as when you left the studio, but it'll look intentional rather than like you just woke up.
Dry shampoo in a pinch. If you don't have sea salt spray, a tiny bit of dry shampoo at the roots adds volume where the helmet pressed everything down. Not quite as good, but it works.
Don't use water on its own. Water without product just makes your hair lie flat again in a different way. You need something with a bit of texture in it.
The long-term answer: get a cut that survives helmets
At a certain point, the easiest fix is to stop fighting it and get a haircut that doesn't care about helmets. The textured crop that everyone in Canggu wears is popular for a reason. Short on top, but not so short that it has only one shape. Ruffle it with your fingers after a ride and it looks like it was supposed to look that way.
The buzz cut is the nuclear option — and if you want to go shorter still, we do head shaves in the studio — here is the honest version of what that involves. Grade one and a half all over. Put helmet on, take helmet off, looks the same. A lot of people who swear by it got there after a summer of fighting helmet hair every day and just giving up. There's a freedom in it.
At the end of the day, if you're going to ride a scooter in Bali, you're going to have helmet hair sometimes. The trick is not to eliminate it — it's to get a cut where helmet hair just looks like your hair.