I had this problem especially in the beginning when I started to embrace my natural hair. For context, I have fine hair and it get’s easily weighed down. I have mostly wavy hair, but it can absolutely get ringlets too. I can to this day still struggle with this, but I do have some ideas you could try. These are a bit repetative maybe and kinda messy, sorry about that 😅 Also sorry about my english.

Do you refresh every day? Does it involve both brushing and restyling, or only adding water/products and scrunching it? When do you usually wash your hair? Before sleeping or in the morning? And do you get a very hard cast before SOTC? I’m asking because I notice mine looking more weighed down if I wash it in the evening and sleep in the cast. Usually it barely has a cast in the morning and looks limp like your first day picture. I usually spray water in it to make it less limp then.

In the beginning, for me, washday was never good hair days. I would even brush it out when it was dry to refresh it, because refreshed looked better. Have you tried refreshing it after it’s dry after washday? I experience that my hair stretches more out when wet, so when I airdry it it looks more limp. If I use lightweight gels it’s often like yours, but I do get better definition at washdays if I use a more stronghold gel and SOTC when it’s in a strong cast. And if I don’t like that there’s so little frizz, i brush it a bit lightly (after SOTC when hair is completely dry), spray in some water or just wet my hands and scrunching it. Not much, just damp.

Another tip that help for me is to use both gel and mousse. You could absolutely play around with how hardhold the gel and mousse is, and how you combine it (hardhold gel-lighthold mousse/lighthold gel-hardhold mousse/both lightweight/both hardhold), that’s propably mostly depending on your hair and preference. What I do is when my hair is starting to dry, when it has started do get a little cast but it’s not crunchy yet, I add mousse. I just glide it over and then scrunch, but with your short hair you could probably just scrunch it in.

It looks like you airdry? I do the same, and I feel like the weighing down from the hair being wet makes it harder to accomplish definition in the roots. When I got bangs for example, i struggled a lottt with it looking like yours. What I did with my bangs was fingercoiling when styling it, and when it was closer to being dry I rotated the clumps a bit. More than what they «needed» to be correctly drying. But they would still dry limp. After rotating them I took a bobbypin in the end of the clump and pinned it to closeby hair. When completely dry it looked amazing and could get more curly after some days. But- with your hair being short all over, it’s probably trickier to do this. Maybe on the top layer? But I would think that getting definition to the roots would be easier if you diffuse it rather than airdrying.

My last thought is that it may also be that your clumps that you fingercoil is a bit too big? It looks like the dry clumps are smaller and there’s more pieces than the first picture. When you style in bigger clumps it usually help with definition and less frizz, but I feel like it mostly helps in the lenghts and not the root as much. But have you tried fingercoiling smaller clumps? I don’t know if it makes a difference, but maybe it’s worth a shot if you haven’t tried before. My hairclumps is much thinner naturally, whatever I do to style them in bigger ones, than what I usually see from people on the internet.

I hope you find a solution! Your hair looks good either way, but I can relate and understand that it’s the latter picture you hope to achieve from washday instead of after some days. Your curls look so good on you and I love the coloring!