KISS Instawave Hair Curler

*I received this product for free for testing/review purposes. All opinions expressed are my own and freely given*

Every straight haired girl dreams of having curly hair at one point or another, but actually curling your hair can be a major pain and takes forever. There are lots of devices on the market claiming to make curling your hair easier, and the KISS Instawave is one such item. I was given the opportunity to test it out and see what I thought and unfortunately I did not like it at all. Part of the problem is my hair is so long the product just doesn't work well. I know fellow bloggers who tested it and loved it, and they all had medium length hair so I'm fairly certain hair length played a major part in my feelings for this device.

What makes the Instawave different from regular curling irons is there is no clip and you yourself don't wind your hair around the shaft, the device does it all for you. The concept is really neat, and I can see how this would really speed up and simplify curling hair that isn't Rapunzel long. I also liked that you can have it curl either clockwise or counter clockwise, which would help to give you more natural looking curls.

Let's start at the beginning. See, uber long hair. I'm trying to grow it out to my butt so it is not getting cut any time soon. And yes, that is a Doctor Who shirt.

I divided my hair in half and then tied the top half up to make things a little easier to curl, otherwise the non-curled hair always gets mixed into the curled hair. You want to curl in one inch chunks, just like with a regular curling iron. I suggest using a heat protecting spray for this, it gets HOT! There are two settings, a low (loose curls or waves) and a high (tight curls), but the low was so hot I was afraid to try the high. The first time I used this I could hear my dry hair crackling from the heat and I actually burned my finger testing it out. So be careful lovelies, don't burn your hair off!

There's this tab that rotates around, you probably saw it in the video, you want your hair to be in between that and the actual heated shaft. Try and get close to your head and keep  it parallel to your hair (I did not during the pictures, was trying not to burn my ear).

Now push the turning button and that tab will spin around and curl your hair around the shaft. Hold in place for about 6 seconds, then pull straight down to slide the curling iron out of your hair and you should have a nice curl.

The curling aspect really works, I got some nice ringlets from doing it as you can see. Now onto the bad stuff. This is suppose to be a tangle free device, and I have to disagree with that.

See that? That is the hair that got tangled and ripped out after doing two chunks of hair. If you look in the spinning video you can see my hair there too. I think because of how long my hair is it is just going to get caught no matter what. And about every third attempt I'd get my hair so tangled I'd actually start to panic about how I was going to get my hair out before it set fire to my head. I haven't seen that complaint from any of my shorter haired bloggers so I'm pretty sure this just isn't designed to handle hair this long. Which is a shame. The other bad thing is it emits a high frequency buzzing sound the whole time it is plugged in, which gets REALLY annoying about 10 minutes in. No idea why it buzzes, that seems like a terrible design flaw to me. I would actually return it if I had bought it because of that buzzing.

Here is a video of it in action, you can actually see it tangling and ripping my hair out. I was not very happy as you can probably see on my face.

Would I recommend this to other people? Sort of. If they have shorter hair and don't mind buzzing sounds in their ear the whole time then this product would work great for them. Will I be using it again? No, I'll stick to my regular old curling iron.

For more info on the product please visit http://www.kissinstawave.com/

I received this product for free for testing/review purposes. All opinions expressed are my own and freely given.