The Only Way to Use Hair Gel to Score the Wet Hair Look
We don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with leaving the house with wet, just-out-of-the-shower hair once in a while, but you’re not likely to see us out and about without at least some semblance of styling. We may also even style it to look wet on purpose, a trend that when done properly, can turn heads for all the right reasons. Once the province of ’80s pop queens and unnamed club-goers alike, the trend has become much more than a throwback ever since it was revived on runways, followed by the red carpet (and, somewhere along the way, Gigi Hadid).
That said, hair gel is still the most important tool of the trade; you can’t get the look without it. In case you didn’t learn how to use hair gel well enough from Robert Palmer music videos alone, you have to start somewhere—and counterintuitively, the wet look must begin with dry hair, preferably unwashed dry hair on its second or third day, so it has a bit of that dirty, grippy texture that keeps the hair from looking too flat when you slick it down.
Take a generous dollop of a shiny, strong-hold gel and work it through the hair from root to tip, then brush through with a fine-tooth comb in the direction of your desired part. If you want it sleeker and shinier, you can continue to build up the gel while it’s still wet until your hair is saturated.
The secret is really in the gel that you use: you want the hair to stay wet-looking and to last without flaking, which is the downfall of many gel formulas. Avoid gels that are meant to enhance curls, as they tend to grow crunchy, and opt instead for a tried-and-true classic, like Bumble and bumble Bb.Gel ($26). It’s definitively not sticky, and it sculpts and molds the hair to encourage your shape and style rather than weigh it down.
Once you’ve got the gel combed through the way you want it, you can hit it with a low blast from the blow-dryer to set, or spray it down with a shellacking hairspray if you really need it to last. If you want your hair kept tight to your head, you can use your hands to press it down; if you want a bit more height, you can use your hands to create lift at the crown from underneath.
If ’80s is what you’re going for, then ’80s is what you can get, but we’ve been seeing hair gel used plenty in a fresh, modern way, so feel free to tweak the variables—the amount of gel, the comb or brush you use, the part, whether you pull your hair up or leave it down—to make it work for you. Believe it or not, hair gel is surprisingly versatile.
