I Tried the Viral TikTok Airplane Hair Curling Trick. Here's How It Went.

 

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A post shared by ERIN RIDER (@erinrider)

As someone with long hair, very little hair styling skills, and a 30-hour flight coming up, I decide to try it.

Here’s my hair after a full day outside in Nairobi (and my face after a nine-hour red-eye flight), before trying the hair curling with socks trick. Photo: Suzie Dundas

According to Instagram and Tiktok, this hack is pretty easy. You start by dividing your hair into two even sections (or three, if you have tons of hair). Then, wrap your hair around a tube sock (holding one end in your mouth while you wrap helps). When you reach the end of your hair, fold the open end of the tube sock over the wrapped hair to keep it in place. You should end up with something that looks like puppy ears on each side of your head. You’ll do this with perfect dry, unstyled hair.

Then, just wait. I tried this on the longest segment of my travel pattern, from Frankfurt, Germany, to San Francisco, California. I landed in Frankfurt after a nine-hour flight from Nairobi, Kenya, and spent the day before that walking around Kenya. So my hair was clean, but a little windblown and wavy, thanks to some light hunidity. Otherwise, my hair is normally pretty straight, which is one reason I was keen to give this hair travel hack a try.

I wrapped my hair on each side around cotton tube socks. Photo: Suzie Dundas

After take off, I pulled out my tube socks to give it a try. Though most videos don’t mention this, I’m guessing the socks are supposed to be clean, which mine weren’t — I was flying home after a 12-day safari, and there are strict weight limits on bags on small bush planes. So I had to work with what I had, which was dirty socks. It’s possible that was part of the reason (spoiler) it didn’t work very well, as the socks may have had some oil or dirt on them that weighed down my hair.

My hair is normally pretty straight and very fine and soft, almost like silky baby hair. That may sound nice, but in reality, it just means my hair breaks easily, gets frizzly, and doesn’t hold curls well. So I knew it would be an uphill battle, but considering how long my flight was, it seemed worth trying just to have something to do.

However, it didn’t take long to realize that my tube socks were not long enough. I either had to stretch the sock a ton, which made it not stay put, or wrap all my hair along a relatively short section of sock, which meant I kind of had to fold my hair upward toward the tips. I ended up trying to stretch the sock as much as possible, and using a hair tie to keep it in place near the top. I also ran out of sock and didn’t have enough fabric left to fold it fully over the wrapped part, so I kind of had to squish my hair a little to make it all fit.

After wrapping, I waited about 10 hours to see if curling my hair with socks would actually work. Photo: Suzie Dundas

After wrapping my hair as well as I could with my too-short socks, I waited. In most of the Instagram videos I’d seen, the women trying it had perfect makeup and looked exactly how you expect a social media influencer would. With no makeup, a lack of sleep, and having just spent nine hours on a flight, I certainly didn’t feel like my look was very chic. So I pulled up my hood to hide the dog ears and tried to find a way to settle into my economy seat headrest without making the socks fall out.

Photo: Suzie Dundas

My flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco was just under 12 hours, so I probably left the sock curls in for about nine to 10 hours. The various videos I saw online didn’t say how long curling hair with socks takes, exactly, so I figured the longer, the better. Since my hair was pretty clean at the time (and clean hair doesn’t usually hold style quite as well), I wanted to maximize the odds that it would work. Plus, I had a hood to cover how ridiculous my dog ears looked.

Despite sleeping on the plane in a squished-down position, smashing my head against a cheap Lufthansa airplane pillow, and shifting and turning over and over for most of the flight, the socks stayed in pretty well. However, that’s probably because I used hir ties to hold the socks in place, which I wouldn’t have had to do if the socks I’d used had been longer. I had some flyaways and frizz around my head, but the socks kept most of the hair in otherwise.

It worked, sort of. Photo: Suzie Dundas

It worked, kind of. As you can see from the photo above, it worked — for a bit. You can see the curls, and unfortunately, you can also see the weird angles around the bottom of my hair where I had to fold my hair and squish it around the bottom of the sock. I think that area would look a lot smoother and better curled if I had used a longer sock. One issue I also noticed is that you should curl your hair away from your face on either side. I curled them the same way, and as a result, both side of my hair are kind of curling to the left, which I think looks a little weird.

Unfortunately, by the time I picked up my luggage, got through customs, and rechecked my bag, the curls had mostly fallen out.

The curls had mostly fallen out about an hour after I removed the socks. Photo: Suzie

That’s probably because I used the wrong kind of product (I used a flyaway smoother before I put the socks in, but should have used a hairspray-type product) and because I really had to smush my hair into the socks to make them fit. Longer socks would have worked a lot better. The other issue is that I should have held the sock straight and wrapped my hair around it, like wrapping my hair around a pole, rather than twisting the sock and my hair together. When I air dry my hair, and just twist the ends as they’re drying, I get much better curls that seem to stay for a lot longer, even without using a product.

I’m not sure that curling my hair with socks worked any better than just twisting the ends while they’re wet, as seen here. Photo: Suzie Dundas

The trick does curl your hair — but getting them to look nice (and getting the curls to stay in place) may take some practice. Photo: Suzie Dundas

My verdict is that yes, curling your hair with socks does work, usually. But it didn’t work well for me, probably because of the way I twisted it and using the wrong socks. Because my hair is fine, if I tried it again, I’d also use some kind of thickening or styling spray beforehand. However, people with hair that dries quickly might find that another method works better: about an hour or two before landing, get the ends of your hair damp in the airplane sink, comb them, and then just slowly twist the ends as they dry. For me, that’s a more efficient method — though I do want to try curling my hair with socks one more time with the right socks to see if that may make a difference.