Big Country Singer Hair Comparison and Review: Big Sexy Hair Powder Play ($16) vs. Not Your Mother's Girl Powder ($6) (picture heavy post)

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Some brilliant and beautiful friends were talking about the fucking amazingness of volumizing powder, and after they showed me their results, I was really intrigued. My hair isn't thin, but it's fine and pretty flat. I've never figured out how to tease volume into it - the best I could do was blow dry it upside down and get a little more volume that way, but it's never been dramatic.

So I was pretty happy to get a sample of Big Sexy Hair Powder Play in my June Glam Bag. It made my hair really big! And it was easy to use. This is definitely another hairstyling technique for the lazy and/or incompetent. I'll get to more about how it works below, but the photo above shows my results.

The downside of the the Big Sexy powder is that it usually sells for around $16. From Amazon, you can get it for less than $9 right now (with free shipping if you have Prime). I was going to buy it from ULTA on sale, but when I missed the sale, I started to look around for a cheaper alternative. What I found was Not Your Mother's Girl Powder, which sells for $6 on drugstore.com $7 on Amazon. It sounded like the same kind of thing, so I decided to pick one up and compare.

What I failed to notice is that the BSH product contains 15 g, while the NYM is only 6 g. That means that per unit, the BSH is actually only slightly more expensive at full price and significantly cheaper from Amazon. Oops! Read the labels, people. Do as I say, not as I do, etc. Anyway, the comparison must go on, because if one works significantly better than the other, than the price might not be the most important factor.

And how did they compare?
They're exactly the same. So identical that I am not even going to review them separately. Everything I describe below pertains to both products.

The bottles feel very light (for a minute I thought that there had been a spill and my NYM powder was empty, but in fact there's a disclaimer on bottle telling you not to worry if it feels like that!). The powders come in a sort of salt shaker style package, and to use them, you shake them directly on your roots, on completely dry hair, almost touching the scalp. Distribute it evenly around your roots, but don't use too much. Then comb your hair backwards (i.e. against the direction of growth) with your fingers along your scalp to spread it around.

What weird is that I've found that the powder seems to draw some moisture out of my scalp or hair when I first apply it, so it works best if you comb it through right away, leave it for a couple of minutes, and then come back and comb it with your fingers again to get more volume. As the day goes on, your hair might lose a little volume, but you can just rake through it against the grain again, and you'll get it all back. Simple.

Your hair will feel sort of rough and crunchy near the roots, but it won't look much duller than it started. Make no mistake: it will not feel nice up there, but just let it go. Start with just a little, because the more you put in, the worse it feels, and the harder it is to comb your fingers though. Add more only if you need it. Oh and it will cause some tangles and static flyaways at first, but you can smooth those out pretty easily. The powder has no scent at all, and it is completely invisible in my dark red hair.

You might find that the powder not wash out completely, but what that means is that you'll have some residual volume the second day. If you shampoo thoroughly twice, you'll probably get it all out.

Okay, enough talk, let's get to the before and afters.

Here's what my hair looks like with no product in it after washing and just letting it air dry:

And here it how it looks after using the BSH powder (and curled using the technique I wrote about here):

Here's the photo without product again, to make comparison easier:

And here's an illustration of how much extreme volume you can get with these powders if you really want to, this time using the NYM powder:

But that's a little much for me, so here's my hair after I smoothed it out a little and made it look less frightening, after using the NYM powder (the only other product I used was this stuff to clean up flyaways):

So there you go. For me that's a lot more volume than usual, with minimal effort. I'm really happy with the results. As for which one you should buy, if you can get the Big Sexy Hair Powder Play for less than $15, it's the better value. But as for performance, they're identical, so take what you can get.

Have you tried a volumizing powder yourself? Did you like it?