Desperate Help - MY Hair is a Disaster!!

It sounds like it could just be your hair type, unfortunately some people are blessed with smoother textured hair than others.

My hair is very fine and soft (each strand of it is very, very thin) but despite it being very soft to the touch it never looks shiny as it just doesn't have the weight to lie flat, then I have a friend whose hair feels coarse to the touch but it always looks smooth because her strands are heavier.

What would you say the texture of your hair is? Frizzy can be a number of different things, it can be that your hair is coarse and wiry, that it has a curl to it that you need to treat differently or that it is fine and flyaway.

Also, out of interest, how old are you? Your hair changes texture as you mature and can become less soft and easy to manage. (your hair texture will change again as it starts to grey usually).

I really doubt that what you are seeing is damage - it takes a lot to damage hair to the point where it is visible if you don't do anything that could be damaging it!

Another thing I just thought of is, when you say you are growing it from short to longer, how short is it to start with? If you are growing out something close to a buzz cut or short crop you will pretty much always get a stage where your hair will look pouffy and fluffy, you might just need to push past that point and wait until it grows a bit more and starts to lie better (or get a good hairdresser who can help you come up with a good strategy for growing out your hair, eg growing out the fringe/ bangs first but keeping the sides shorter and then allowing a bit of length through the sides once it has more weight on top).

Yea I agree with Lauralei, I just grew out my pixie and I went through a lot of weird stages where sometimes my hair was poufy and looked frizzy and then I went through the stage where is looked slicked down to my scalp and no matter how hard I tried I could not get any volume in it. So it very well could be an awkward growing out phase.

Can I suggest you try the curly girl method. Don't be put off by the name, there's loads of men that do it. It annoys me that it's been called the curly GIRL method. Most people that have frizzy hair normally find this helps enormously. You have to experiment a bit, but there's normally something that helps.

It could be as simple as leaving in some conditioner instead of rinsing it all out. That helps my hair so much.
<<<That's my natural curly hair which once I thought was straight/wavy/frizzy/unmanageable hair until I discovered my own version of the curly girl method (long before the internet).

I've just tried googling and I found this aimed at men http://www.manemanblog.com/2012/03/27/the-abbreviated-curly-girlguy-method/

I second Janine's suggestion of trying to treat your hair as curly and seeing if it's any better - it took me years to work out that my hair had gone wavy and that something as simple as brushing it with a bristle brush as I did as a kid when it was straight was just making it frizzier!