Baking in the heat

Frizzy hair, sweat-soaked singlets — not even the great Kiwi pavlova has been safe from this summer’s humid onslaught.

“Bad hair days, clammy hands

. . . it has just been oppressive,” said Niwa meteorologist Ben Noll.

“If you’ve been in a place that doesn’t have air conditioning, you will have been sweating.”

And it hasn’t just been us. Baking fans might have noticed how pavlovas, a Kiwi summer classic, have been dripping sugar.

“We call that beading,” Kiwi cooking guru Allyson Gofton said, which is when cakes leak droplets of sugar from the inside. It was more of a problem when people stored pavlovas for a day or two after baking.

The relentless mugginess had been a hot topic among city hairdressers having to negotiate extra frizz, said Kurtis Counsell, of Auckland salon Hair Nerd.

“We are getting a lot of people with frizzy hair asking what they can do about it but it’s pretty unavoidable.

“You could sell them anything with anti-frizz or anti-humidity, but when it’s as humid as it has been, it really isn’t going to do that much.”

The messy look was caused by the extra amounts of hydrogen hanging in the air, which formed bonds between the protein and water molecules in hair, making it curlier and frizzier.

Incredibly, our bodies can adapt after just a few weeks of humid weather, by better balancing our fluids and sweating more efficiently. But until that occurred, we found it harder to deal with mugginess than dry heat.

It was still tough to acclimatise to hot nights — especially for those who didn’t have air conditioning, or a good fan.