And the signs were there. Highly visible musicians like Lorde, St. Vincent and Rita Ora have made curly manes part of their look. Art-world darlings like the young photographers Olivia Bee and Petra Collins are also skipping the blowout. The look is styled but a little messy, even embracing a certain amount of ... yes, frizz. And with a new interest in curly hair has come a demand for salons accomplished in dealing with it.

Image Astrid Chastka, a fashion designer in Greenpoint. Credit... Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

“People want too much control over their hair, but anything you try to control too much loses its magic,” said Laura Connors, a stylist at Seagull, a salon in the West Village that specializes in curly hair. “I’m trying to get my clients to accept not a halo of puff but some frizz. It’s realistic and a sexy look.”

Yet even if curls are now cool, it’s hard to shake lingering stereotypes, like the assumption that curly-haired women are “loopy and zany and can’t be taken seriously,” in the words of Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky and author of the Girls of a Certain Age blog. “There is a total cultural bias against women with curly hair,” said Ms. France, who has gone through phases of wearing her hair curly and straight. “And hair stylists are really snobby, very uncreative with curly hair.”

It doesn’t help that celebrities who wear their hair curly (think of Taylor Swift or Sarah Jessica Parker circa “Sex and the City”) have a carefully coifed, high-maintenance look that’s almost impossible to replicate at home. “Clearly someone has taken a curling iron and curled every piece,” said Astrid Chastka, a fashion designer who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “It’s like, ‘No, you didn’t do that on your own.’ Let’s see that without a stylist.”

By general agreement, curls have a life of their own. “They are going to move, lay different each day, and humidity needs to be taken into consideration,” said Morgan Willhite, the creative director of Ouidad, another salon that focuses on curly hair, with locations in Midtown and in Santa Monica, Calif. “You have to train your eye to look at it.”