Editor’s Note: This week’s Sparks comes from Gabrielle, who handles marketing and social for Gingergeist and who has been building a case about hair tools for months. We handed her the issue.
My morning blowout takes about forty minutes. I start with the Dyson, set it with Drybar rollers, and end up with the exact result every other morning routine on my feed promises. By dinner it has usually collapsed. If I had used my mother’s roller set, bought in 1991 for $30, the same style would have held for two days. Those rollers are still in a closet at my parents’ house. They still work… but I am reluctant to throw them away until I find a modern-day tool that give me the same results, and that is the part worth explaining.
Volume came back to the algorithm this year. Dolly Parton, who died last month, liked to say that the higher the hair, the closer to God. She never mentioned the part that went without saying in her world: who has to get up early enough to put it there. Most of the coverage treats volume the same way, as an easy look, and skips what it costs to hold. That omission is the story, because the hour costs more than the tool ever did.
Spate’s 2026 Hair Care & Styling report puts hair care searches up 20.6% this year while Instagram posts in the category are down 21.7%. More people are looking things up, and fewer are showing the result, which is what a category looks like when the hard part moves from buying to doing. The searching is loudest around volume.
Your Mother’s Volume Is Back
Kaia Gerber plays Susan Reynolds in The Shards, the Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis prep-school thriller set in 1981 Los Angeles, which premiered on FX on August 5. The styling puts Gerber in heavy side-parted curls, and the resemblance to her mother is doing numbers online. The better detail happened during filming, when she called Cindy Crawford to ask whether the hair was even realistic. Gerber told Entertainment Tonight there was no way Crawford did her hair like that for high school. Crawford said she woke up at four in the morning to set it, because that was simply how hair had to look, and then produced her own photos at seventeen to prove it. The question is the interesting part. Crawford waking up that early is one thing. Her own daughter could not imagine anyone doing it, and had to ask, at the exact moment the look came back.
Spate measured US search and social data from July 2025 to June 2026, and four of the ten fastest-growing hair styling products are volume plays. Volumizing powder is up 73.8%. Volume spray is up 60.5%. Air-dry cream, tied directly to heatless curls, is up 154.4%, and root-lifting spray climbs 189.9% for everyone chasing the same effect out of a can.
Rollers themselves have come back in every available format to fill the gap they left. On the one hand, women hunt for vintage hot roller sets on eBay and rewire them at home. On the other, a younger group is discovering Lottabody and running errands in plastic rollers. Whichever way you go, note that the curling wand stays in the drawer.
No one who grew up in the early aughts learned this from her mother. We are learning it from strangers on the internet, one video at a time. A roller set demands sectioning, smoothing, and steady tension all the way down. You start with hair 80 to 90% dry and let the set cool for about an hour before you touch it. That cooling hour is the trick, and it is the part no tool has learned to skip. The shape sets as the hair cools under tension. Hot air alone does not set anything, which is why my forty minutes falls out by dinner and her thirty-dollar rollers held for two days. Rush any part of it, and you get dents. Impatience is the fastest way to ruin a set.
My mother never needed a tutorial. She learned it the way you learn to make coffee, from a room full of women who already knew. Somewhere between her bathroom and mine, that room disappeared.
The Room Became A Business
So an industry formed to replace the room. Search "roller sets" on TikTok and the results read like a syllabus: Roller Set 101, chapter one, multi-part series, creators joking that the full step-by-step turned into a feature film. Brigette Pheloung, now McHale, of Acquired Style has said that when she started making roller videos, she was still working it out on camera herself. She now sells her own sets through Phe Phe, the brand she launched with her twin sister Danielle.
Color Wow has Chris Appleton demonstrating a four-section Velcro method and sells matching rollers. Haiirology sells Blowout Basics, a paid online course in blow-drying your own hair. Cécred, Beyoncé’s brand, launched its first styling collection this year, including a Wrap & Set Foam built for roller sets and heatless curls. Color Wow and Cécred are still selling products with instructions attached. Haiirology is the one to watch, because it inverted the model: the course is the product. When the tutorial carries its own price tag, the category has stopped pretending the hour is free.
Who What Wear's 2026 guide sells a TikTok-viral Conair set at $43 on the promise of Cindy Crawford volume. Note the number. My own mother's 1991 set cost $30, about $70 in today's money, which makes the rollers the one thing in this story that got cheaper. Gerber is on television asking whether anyone really used to do this, while the beauty press quietly sells Crawford's hair back to the rest of us in a box, for less than my mother paid for hers.
Ginger Spark: The technique used to be free, with some light pulling as collateral. My mother learned it from her mom and her aunt. I learned it from TikTok and more products than I want to admit to. She never had to be told volume was trending. The category is not selling volume. It is selling the instruction, the setup, and the hour you have to give it. Hair care stopped competing on results and started competing for your time, and it is winning. Which leaves the obvious opening wide open. Every brand in this story is monetizing the cooling hour, and not one of them is trying to eliminate it. The first tool that delivers a two-day set in forty minutes takes the whole category. Until then, the rollers stay in that closet, still working, still free, still asking for an hour I will not give them.
